Don't Stop Me Now

Maserati Quattroporte

Have you driven a modern-day Ferrari? Because it doesn’t matter what you drive now, you would stumble from the experience, reeling in slack-jawed, wide-eyed astonishment at just how good it had been.

In a current Ferrari you have a oneness with the machine that you simply don’t get from any other car. You feel connected, you feel assimilated. The steering, the brakes and the throttle don’t feel like a collection of metal and wires and carbon fibre. They feel like they’re organic extensions of your fingers and your toes.

This means you have no sense of manhandling the beast, of taming the monster. And because everything you do feels as natural and as instinctive as breathing, you can go much, much faster than you dreamed possible.

I was, at this point, going to liken Ferrari to Manchester United. But the simile doesn’t quite work because in the world of football there are Chelsea and Arsenal who, on the day, are capable of beating the big boy. But in the world of cars no one gets even close.

When you climb out of an Aston Martin Vanquish and into a 575, it is like climbing out of the eleventh century and on to the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. Emotionally, both cars tug your heart strings with equal force, but mechanically the Ferrari is hundreds of years ahead.

We see the same sort of thing higher up the scale, too. Porsche was undoubtedly proud of its Carrera GT, and no doubt Mercedes had a warm, gooey sense of contentment when its McLaren SLR went on sale. I drove both, and they were magical. And then I drove Ferrari’s rival, the Enzo, which, as a speed machine, was just miles better.

From this we can draw a sad but inescapable conclusion. Having the money to buy a Ferrari and then buying something else means you are going home with second best. You are buying south of the river, a Henman, a Bolton Wanderer.

So why do we do it? Why have I ordered a Ford GT when I could have had a technically superior 430 from Ferrari? Why are we tripping over Bentley Continentals when their owners could have had a 575 or a 612? Why is the DB9 one of the world’s most sought-after cars when on any playing field, against any Ferrari, it would lose about 6–0?

Well, of course, the problem is very simple. Ferraris are just a little bit disgusting, with a dash of Beckham and a hint of Ferdinand. A Ferrari just won’t go with your Fired Earth flooring and your BBC2 viewing habits. A Ferrari is sculpted vulgarity, which means we must turn our attention now to its bastard son. The Maserati Quattroporte.

I’m aware, of course, that the comedian Jimmy Carr reviewed this car when I was away, and I’m aware that he liked it very much. But then, what was the editor expecting? Asking a man who replaced a Rover 75 with another Rover 75 to review a car like the Maserati is a bit like asking a refugee from Chad to review the Ivy. He’s going to be overwhelmed.

I wasn’t. I’ve been watching Maserati’s endless attempts to crack the nut for nearly 20 years now, and they’ve all been completely hopeless. Everything, from the wheezing Biturbo through the old Quattroporte to the 3200GT, was nothing more than a great badge from the 1950s nailed to a car that had all the grace and aesthetic appeal of Hattie Jacques.

The company was owned by Citroën, the Italian government, and then an Argentine playboy who sold bits of it to Chrysler, which couldn’t manage and offloaded the whole thing to Fiat, who eventually fobbed it off to Ferrari, who joined forces with Volkswagen and turned the horrid 3200GT into the 4200, which wasn’t very nice either.

At this point the powers that be in Italy decided I had it in for their useless bits of half-arsed engineering and banned me from driving all of their press demonstrators. So, last year, when they launched the new Quattroporte, I was in Coventry.

No big deal, I figured. Coventry’s exactly the place to be when you have £70,000 in your pocket and a burning need to buy a large, fast, four-door saloon car. There was, I convinced myself, no way that the big Maserati could possibly hold a candle to the supercharged Jag.

I was still thinking along the same lines as the spat with Maserati ended and they said I could borrow a Quattroporte after the man from the Welsh Pig Breeders’ Gazette had had a go. And so, last week, what looked like a swollen Vauxhall Cresta rumbled up my drive.

I stepped inside and, after a bit of fumbling among a dizzying array of buttons, found the switch that slides the seat backwards. It didn’t work. At first I assumed this might be because it was Italian, and therefore broken, but in fact the seat was as far back as it would go. Which wasn’t far enough.

That night, however, I wedged myself into the ‘Cresta’ and set off for dinner with the local lord. It was dark and sort of drizzling, so I constantly needed to flick the wipers on, and dip the headlights as I met cars coming the other way.

This was unusually hard to do because the ‘Cresta’ has a stupid, flappy paddle gearbox that is operated by levers right next to the headlamp and wiper stalks. So every time I met a car coming the other way I changed into fourth.

You can solve this by pushing a button that makes the gearbox an automatic. But then the changes are so ham-fisted that you will feel like you’ve moved back 200 years. And the ride’s pretty sudden as well.

We arrived at the big house and I pressed the central locking button, which illuminated a light on the underside of the passenger-side door mirror. Hmmm. Was this some kind of feature, a time-delay device to light the path to the door? Or was it a faulty piece of wiring?

I waited to see if it would go out. And then I waited some more. I was just about to give up waiting when I thought that most people with Maseratis would have a long walk to the house, so maybe it would stay on a while yet. So I waited a little longer.

And then, when I was very wet and cold, I unlocked the car, which illuminated all the lights except the one under the door mirror on the passenger’s side, which went out. So I locked up again, and it came back on again.

At this point I thought of an expression that rhymes with bucket and went inside for dinner. Or pudding as it had become by then.

So, the ‘Cresta’? It looks like a Vauxhall from the 1970s, it’s cramped, the gearbox is stupid, the ride is too hard and its wiring is as cockeyed as the leaning tower of Pisa. And yet, despite all this, I absolutely loved it.

First of all, there’s the name. Despite the efforts of everyone who’s owned the company over the past 30 years, it still has a ring. ‘Shall we take the Maserati tonight, darling?’ That sounds good. And then there’s the way it goes. The 4.2-litre V8 develops 400 brake horsepower, which is a hundred down on the German benchmark these days. But, unlike the German rivals, there’s no electronic limiter, so when the AMG Benz is on the buffers at 155, you’ll be able to keep on going. All the way to 170.

Then there’s the noise. Mostly, it’s quiet and serene in the super-tasteful cabin, but when you put your foot down, there’s a faraway, dreamy peal of thunder. It’s great.

What’s more, on a dry, clear day when you don’t have to worry about wipers and dipping the lights, even the gearbox becomes manageable. Not nice, you understand, and nowhere near as good as a proper manual. But usable nevertheless.

The best thing about this car, though, is the ‘feel’. At no point do you have a sense that you’re in a large four-seater saloon. It turns and grips and brakes with a fluidity and a sense of purpose that you just don’t get from any big Jag, Audi, Mercedes or BMW.

I’ll tell you what it feels like. It feels like a Ferrari – and, technically speaking, that’s the highest praise there is. But, of course, the Maserati is not a Ferrari. And that makes it even better.

It’s less brash than a Ferrari, more refined than a Ferrari, more practical than a Ferrari and, at £70,000, less expensive than a Ferrari as well.

Sunday 6 February 2005

Don’t Stop Me Now