MASERATI QUATTROPORTE SPORT GT

Few car companies can get away with inviting journalists to fly halfway around the world to spend a couple of days driving what is essentially a tarted-up two-year-old model. But when the car company’s name ends in “i” and the invitation is to visit Modena, Italy, well, you go.

But first, some background. Maserati introduced its top-of-the-line Quattroporte to much critical acclaim nearly two years ago (“Four the Italian Way,” March 29, 2004). The elegant four-door (hence the name Quattroporte) shape from Pininfarina exudes the sexiness one expects from a car with an Italian lineage. Beneath the hood beats a 4.2-liter V8 built at the Ferrari shop down the road in Maranello. So as far as Italian street creds go, the Quattroporte is loaded.


But a lot has changed for Maserati since the car’s launch. Maserati was joined at the hip with Ferrari when the Quattroporte was introduced. While the company still has a strong relationship with the Prancing Horse, Maserati is now functioning on its own beneath the large umbrella of the Fiat group. Two years ago Maserati had a technology-sharing agreement with Audi, but that has gone by the wayside, too. Maserati is now working closely with Fiat sibling Alfa Romeo.


A new leader has taken over at Maserati—Karl Heinz Kalbfell, the man BMW tapped to relaunch the venerable Rolls-Royce marque, is now in charge.



“This is a sound company,” Kalbfell said. “The significant work done by Ferrari is evident [Ferrari building the engines, for example]. It’s very impressive, and we’re on our way to further progress.”


That progress means a couple of things in Kalbfell’s mind. One, of course, is sales, where the Quattroporte is playing a big role. In 1998, suffering from a weak model lineup and an even weaker reputation for quality, Maserati sold just 518 cars. Last year, through 281 dealers in 57 countries, Maserati sold 5654 cars. While that number is a smudge on most automakers’ annual sales charts, it is huge for a company that churns out 25 mostly hand-built cars per day (16 Quattroportes and nine Coupes/Spyders).


The other measure of progress is in customer satisfaction. To that extent Maserati has 50 people now working in quality control at the factory, trying to make sure body panels are fitted properly, paint is perfect, and all the electrical and mechanical things work the way they are supposed to. In today’s cutthroat car world, being beautiful and Italian will take you only so far. If 50 sounds like a small number, consider the factory employs just 700 people total.


Of the 5654 Maseratis sold last year, 40 percent found homes in the United States, and 1550 of those cars were Quattroportes. Kalbfell sees room for Maserati growth—up to 9000 vehicles coming out of the Modena factory—by expanding models within the two product lines: sports cars (two-door models) and what he calls “sports business” cars (four-door models) in the Quattroporte family.


“We smell success, but the competition is more than tough,” Kalbfell says.


So Maserati is offering a couple of fresh variants of the Quattroporte—the Executive GT, which is an interior trim package that will be sold primarily in Europe, and the Sport GT, which is the car that lured us to Italy and is expected to be a big seller in the United States.

The sumptuous shape of the car that dazzled us a couple of years ago remains the same. But the Sport GT model gets a blacked-out honeycombed grille and a small GT badge on the B-pillar. The car rides on unique 20-inch seven-spoke alloy wheels with visible titanium brake calipers and cross-drilled rotors. Look closer and you’ll see braided metal brake lines.


Inside, carbon fiber trim replaces all the wood found in the standard model, and there is a new multifunction steering wheel and drilled aluminum pedals.


Mechanically, no changes are made to the 4.2-liter V8 engine that delivers 393 hp at 7000 rpm and 333 lb-ft of torque at 4500 rpm. A new sport exhaust is fitted, and the resulting song coming from the quad pipes is exactly what you want from an Italian sports car. The Sport GT’s 0-to-60-mph time of 5.1 seconds is the same as the Quattroporte we wrote about two years ago, so the $8,500 premium for the Sport GT won’t help you at the drag strip.


The same six-speed DuoSelect transaxle operated via steering column-mounted paddle shifters remains, though the electronics running it now make the gear changes quicker than before. Maserati says once the Sport button is engaged, the unit will change gears in 40 milliseconds at 7000 rpm. The Sport mode also stiffens the Skyhook electronic suspension and fine-tunes the Maserati Stability Program, allowing for a firmer ride and an invitation for more aggressive driving.


The car really rewards a spirited approach. Not only is peak power near the upper reaches of the 7500-rpm rev range, but the gear shifts snap off crisply one after another while in the rpm stratosphere. At slower speeds, frankly, the gearbox remains clunky until you get the hang of revving up the engine, letting off the throttle and shifting. Smooth gear changes can be done at slow speeds but not as easily as in hard driving. In the gearbox’s automatic mode, forget it. Smooth is not a word one would ever use to describe its operation.


Kalbfell admits a true automatic transmission, probably a six-speed unit, is in the works, but that it is at least a couple of years off. In the meantime Maserati dealers have been instructed to stop telling customers the sequential manual gearbox is “just like an automatic.” Customer satisfaction numbers are important, even to Maserati. The tricky part for Maserati, Kalbfell says, will be developing the automatic while keeping the car’s weight balance where it is now—47 front/53 rear. “Whatever we do, we do not want to change the balance of the car,” Kalbfell said.

That balance is important, because the Quattroporte Sport GT has rather amazing handling characteristics considering the car weighs 4334 pounds. Driving it on twisty roads south of Modena—the same neck of the woods where Sen. Bob Dole was wounded while a member of the 10th Mountain Division in World War II—the car feels much, much lighter than it is.


Pushing the Maserati hard into corners, we never felt it get out of sorts, with the chassis and suspension working to keep the car well-balanced and leaving us hungry for the next corner. The car’s cornering ability is far greater than our willingness to find its limits. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t have fun trying.