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The first wave of Alfas due to arrive in the US in 2009 will be the Brera, 159 saloon and Sportwagon, and the sexy Spider. If all goes well with those, it's rumoured that two larger cars - an SUV based on the swoopy Kamal concept and a rear-drive 169 exec express, which uses the next Quattroporte architecture - plus, if the price is right, a Punto-based effort called the Junior, will join the Italian line-up by about 2012.

As an awareness-raiser, the sense-jamming Alfa 8C - the only car I've ever seen that's more attractive than the stunning girls on Alfa's Geneva Show stand - will spearhead the charge. But as most of them have already been pre-sold, it's the lowlier models, such as the Spider, that'll have to do the talking.

And they better talk pretty loud and pretty fast too, if they are going to reach their sales targets. The Alfas are going to be sold through the 50 or so US Maserati dealers, who currently sell three or four cars each a month.

When Spider and co turn up, that figure is going to have to jump to 33-plus a month, every month, or there'll be severed horses heads appearing at the bottom of several beds shortly after. Capice?

That's the background then. Now it's time to see what locals have to say about the car, but not before we've had a proper go in the Spider ourselves.

I've got a feeling we are going to be asked plenty of questions about it - the generally car-savvy American public tends to ask what type of engine your car has before they even ask your name - so we have to arm ourselves with answers.

The first of those is what is under the bonnet. I've been told it is the 260bhp 3.2-litre V6 - not the 2.2 four - but by the time I've got a couple of miles up the road I'm not so sure. I'd expected sparkling performance with crisp acceleration and a suitably fruity exhaust note.

What I've got is a disappointingly unresponsive lump that makes every one of the car's 1,690kg felt, and sounds like a potato has been stuck up the exhaust pipe. I blip the throttle on the downchanges and, instead of a zing, I get a disinterested yawn from the engine room.

To compound matters, the gearchange is not the rifle-bolt-action style set-up I've been expecting and the clutch has to be pushed almost to the floor to work.

We've driven the car before in Italy and we know the transmission can be much better than this, but the fact remains that, on this car, it sucks. Which doesn't help me like the engine - usually the centerpiece of an Alfa - any more than I already don't.