Episode 90 of the Alfa Romeo Driver podcast – brought to you by the Alfa Romeo Owners Club - is a little different to our usual format. Editor Guy Swarbrick sat down with Club management team member and MiTo nerd David Faithful for a half hour chat about the new STLA Large platform that will underpin the replacements for the Giulia and Stelvio – and by the time we’d finished, we had over an hour of material.

So we’ve split it into two roughly half hour long episodes, which we’ve made available at the same time – so if you listen on your drive to work or simply don’t want to listen to the two of us waffling on for an hour, you can listen to the two episodes separately – or, of you’re a glutton for punishment with nothing better to do, you can listen to them back-to-back.

This first part is really about the benefits of platform sharing – and the history of platform sharing at Alfa Romeo up to the Tonale – and Episode 91 will cover the upcoming Milano and the STLA large announcement. They should make sense as a pair or separately – or, at least, they should make as much sense individually as they do together.