Jürgen Claus grew up in Stuttgart, but he didn’t follow the conventional German philosophy. Something else had caught his eye. With flashes, glances and a few stolen stills during his bike rides, he spotted a car.

The Alpine was born in Dieppe, France, in the early 1960s, as Jean Rédélé’s vision of a sports car built for agility. It was compact, slim-looking and deceptively fast. It won everywhere, on the stages of Monte Carlo, in the Alps, on gravel, on tarmac. It was light, agile and utterly relentless. In 1973, when the World Rally Championship was officially founded, it was the Alpine A110 that took the first title, proving that more horsepower wasn’t always better.