Fashion is a slippery bugger. The moment you allow yourself to think you've got a hold of it, it flies out of your hands like a bar of soap. Classical beauty lasts longer, and Alfa must be glad of this, for here they are launching a car first shown four whole years ago.

If the 8C Competizione's styling had been tied to the ship of fashion back then, it'd be wrecked on some forgotten coast by now. Luckily it wasn't. It was, and remains, knee-tremblingly gorgeous in the time-honoured manner of an Italian front-engined two-seater.

Just how gorgeous was hard to appreciate when we only ever glimpsed it in sections at motor shows, the majority of its form always occluded by the close-pressed palpitating flesh of car-loving humanity. But now it's out in the open and ready to roll, the answer is entirely gorgeous.

It was designed by Wolfgang Egger, then Alfa design boss, now at Audi. At the time of the concept car he told me it was 'modern, but with tradition,' when I asked him if it was too retro. It harks back to the era of coachbuilt track-biased Alfas. "We remembered the 2000 Sportiva, the 33 Stradale and the TZ."

Holy cow, they were good things to remember. It has the long, high nose and short teardrop cabin of the TZ, and the extraordinarily beautiful surface curves of the 33 Stradale. Which is all well and good, but I do have some reservations about this car. Let's get them out of the way, eh, so we can end on a high note.

For a start, look at the name: 8C Competizione. The 8C is easy - eight cylinders, reflecting honestly a long-time Alfa designation. But Competizione: where's the racing? The looks reflect old Alfa racers, yes, and it's made partly of carbon. But it's not a semi-racer. It's a road car, built for style and Sunday morning blasts. That's OK, so why give it a travesty of a name?

Maybe the dishonesty of the word Competizione was OK on a concept car, which is how it started out all those years ago. Such a clamour of adoration built up around it that Alfa started to look at production. But before long, parent company Fiat was in such deep do-do that they couldn't contemplate anything so wildly non-core.

Then Fiat healed itself, and the project was back on, engineered to this state in just 18 months. But it remains non-core, a V8 supercar that's triple the price of anything else Alfa does.

A halo car, you say? Well yes, it'll score Alfa some attention as it goes back to the USA in 2009. The 8C is a seriously enticing machine, but it doesn't really advance the art of the supercar. And frankly I can't help wishing they'd put these engineers onto finessing the Brera a bit. Still, to be fair, I always had the same reservations about the irrelevance of the Ford GT, and I have to admit I was in the minority. Enough musing. Let's drive.