Maserati MC12: Showpiece of the Week
Maserati's Ferrari-based Ferrari slayer doesn't come cheap - and nor should it
The term 'race car for the road' is vastly overused these days. Stiffening the suspension, adding a dash of alcantara and upping the downforce does not a race car make. A homologated version of an FIA GT Championship entrant, though? Now that's more like it.
With Ferrari having taken full control of Maserati from parent company Fiat in the late 90s, anticipation of a return to the marque's glory days was high. The Coupe was a solid if slightly underwhelming start, but something more was needed to reinvigorate the Maserati name. The Italian brand concluded, as one would expect, that the best way to achieve this was to go racing.
Luckily Ferrari already had the perfect platform, the Enzo. And borrowing the chassis, engine and gearbox gave Maserati the tools it needed to build a racing machine worthy of such auspicious DNA. In its first full competition season, the MC12 dominated proceedings, winning the championship by over 100 points from Ferrari itself.
To go racing, though, the MC12 first needed homologating, and to that end the required 25 roadgoing examples were produced in 2004 - with a further 25 cars being made the following year. Despite their shared underpinnings, the MC12 was a drastically different proposition to its sister car. Measuring a full 44cm longer than the Ferrari, it was taller and wider too, with the windscreen being the only external component shared between the two vehicles.
But despite its Le Mans car looks and track-based breeding, not everything with the MC12 was how it seemed. In order to prevent the historical rivals from treading on each other's toes, it was decided when they became stablemates Maserati would take on the role of Ferrari's luxury arm. It would produce comfortable-yet-sporty GTs which could fit a suitcase and maybe even a rear passenger, whilst Ferrari focused on what it always had done - purebred supercars.
It's thanks to this that the MC12 can today boast a cushier cabin and more accommodating suspension than the Enzo, while it revs to a less frantic 7,500rpm than the 8,200rpm Ferrari, too. Facts which lead Autocar's review of the car to state: "At a cruise (a 150mph cruise, that is) there is surprisingly little wind noise, and the engine is as muted as a dozing grizzly bear. You really can imagine touring from London to Nice in this thing and not feeling frazzled."
At this end of the spectrum, though, softness is relative. It's still a carbon monocoqued monster, meaning that the V12's 630hp will shift all 1,335kg of it from 0-62mph in 3.8 seconds and on to a top speed of 205mph. Enough to see the MC12 lap the Top Gear test track 0.1 seconds faster than the Enzo.
At £500,000 new, you could have had five for the current price of this week's Showpiece, but such is the market these days. But this is the greatest roadcar Maserati has ever built, one genuinely based on a successful Maserati race car, which itself was based on the pinnacle of Ferrari's contemporary road and race technology. You didn't really expect it to be cheap, did you?
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