The Maserati MC12 should have seen the marque returned to the top of the sportscar world. Sadly not, says Nick Hall.
You'd like to think that spending €600,000 on a car before taxes would buy a small four-wheel slice of heaven. Especially if you were one of the lucky few to secure a Maserati MC12.
You'd be wrong.
The MC12 should have been an icon, Maserati's return to the top of the sportscar world. But when the press were limited to just six laps on the international launch, three tours of a high-speed bowl and three on a tight handling course, the whole place began to stink distinctly of rat. Most meaningful tests since then have been due to the good grace of private owners, including my 160km run through the quiet back roads and at derestricted lunatic speeds on the German Autobahn.
This was perhaps the most unique MC12 in the world as Europe's biggest solar panel dealer paid Edo Competition in Germany another €100,000 to fix all the problems with his car. He didn't even want to drive it without the changes made by the race engineer turned tuner. Predictably, the car is now perfect, a luxuriously decked out racing car for the road that could meet and beat more or less anything on the road, but it didn't start out that way.
The MC12 was nothing more than a homologation special, a Ferrari Enzo clothed in different colours and built for the FIA GT Championship. It would still feel perfect when driven in isolation, but in a back-to-back test with the much cheaper Enzo, it feels like a three-legged donkey.
And it shouldn't, because the MC12 and Enzo share the same chassis and drivetrain. But then Ferrari is a vain mistress and would never allow the more exclusive MC12 to blow it off the road.
So the MC12 runs a lower rev limit, just over 7,000 compared to the Ferrari's 8,000 and has 'just' 630bhp at its disposal. Maserati's 'triumph' also tops out at 205mph, compared to a much healthier 217mph for the Enzo. It was like buying Red Rum and finding him on sleeping pills.
This was still a car that blasted through the 60mph barrier in 3.7 seconds with a six-litre engine that buzzed through the revs so fast it was hard to keep pace with the paddleshift gear changes. It was still a car that could redefine your version of quick after stepping out of normal daily transport and do it all to the sound of that glorious wailing V12 soundtrack that is inimitably Ferrari, despite the Maserati badge, and steeped in F1 heritage.
This is automotive art, one of those machines that can tug at the heart strings and the horizon alike, reducing continents to short finger-blipping bursts, but it could have been better.
The fixed suspension was hastily thrown together, resulting in a car that bounced off ruts and skipped on the road at high speeds, so a new fully adjustable system has gone on to the car. Then there were the brakes and tyres, a set-up that Edo Karabegovic labels as "ridiculous".
Steel brakes are fine for a Mondeo, but even high-end Porsche 911s have ceramic discs now and the MC12's basic equipment lies in its racing heritage. The Enzo is the ultimate road car and will never go racing in an official capacity. The MC12, meanwhile, was built to track regulations that include steel brakes. This is no road car, it was never meant to be.
The Pirelli tyres, though, are simply part of a deal it has with the French rubber manufacturer to run on its brand. Pirelli supplied a catch-all tyre that was overwhelmed by a chassis built on specially formulated Bridgestone Scuderias and developed to near perfection by test drivers including Michael Schumacher on the Enzo.
Understeer and imprecision were the end results and a car that simply couldn't come close to the Ferrari or other cars in its class, like the Pagani Zonda F, under braking.
Long bodywork is designed to provide the perfect compromise between downforce and drag on high-speed circuits, not country roads and the result is a 5,143mm, about the same length as a Land Rover Discovery 3.
That hampers its skills round town and on the base car those long extremities pitched and wallowed in bend.
And all the work that goes into those delicate vanes on the nose comes at a huge cost, €34,000 for a replacement front section if you go off the road to be precise. The price is embedded on Edo's brain as he heat-formed new headlight covers directly on to the bodywork, risking a substantial bill had he got it wrong.
Inside, this car is a nightmare too. The pedal offset is so pronounced that it physically hurt over a long distance. Maserati's attention to detail and customer care shines through in the way that the ornate clock has seemingly been smashed into an ill-shaped hole in the dashboard.
It just would not get through Porsche or BMW's quality control line, maybe not even Fiat's and the slapdash approach on the surface made me worry about the mechanical work underneath.
But the performance and driving dynamics were irrelevant.
All the cars were sold before the first turned a wheel and most went straight into private museums, automotive mausoleums that will never see the light of day.
Their flaws will never be exposed by owners that simply want to appreciate them like a fine watercolour.
This one has racked up 5,000km in three months. Considering the man that carries the keys has a fleet of Ferraris and Lamborghinis that Edo is now working on, that's as hearty an endorsement of its skills as can possibly exist. Then again, it does now do 386km/h, will leave an Enzo for dead and recently destroyed a Porsche Carrera GT in a German group test.
It only took new ceramic brakes, a remapped engine that now revs to 8,250 rpm and more, fully adjustable suspension, a new exhaust, air intakes, aerodynamics, Bridgestone tyres ... well just about everything really, to put this icon right. The simple truth is that the much cheaper Enzo blew the original MC12 off the map, though.
Just goes to show, you don't always get what you pay for.