Born in Thunder

This brand, this spirit, this grandezza of technical and aesthetic mastery of the most extreme demands in racing and on the road! A commitment to this excellence, in the form of a ramp special for the Maserati brand, is a perfect reflection of the ambition that keeps driving us forward anyway – to celebrate the car as a cultural institution, the ever-fresh experience of independent driving, to commemorate the elegance and the joy of individual transportation in its most beautiful and successful forms.

Too much? A bit over the top? But every now and then you just have to tug at your shirt cuffs, treat yourself to a glass of chilled champagne, hold it up to the setting sun and ramble on in front of the assembled audience, into the promising evening of a successful day. Because there’s always something to celebrate at Maserati.

Perhaps it was that day when you got up early in the morning, earlier than everyone else, and only the cat was witness to you sneaking through the portico to the garage, turning aside the heavy metal latch and swinging open the door with the soft creak of promise. That scent, that beauty in the warm depths of the room, that morning glow in the headlights! Advance tidings of an early morning drive, when the spicy air is still richly cool, compressed, so to speak, before it enters the chambers as a ready-to-burn mixture and ignites as joyfully as we hope our celebratory speech will do.

Suppose we now have several options in this early morning garage magic. Do we choose the beguilingly beautiful Ghibli from 1968, which Giorgetto Giugiaro still considers to be his most successful design? To push our luck even further, we could fantasize about a 1968 model variant, namely the Spyder version also designed by Giugiaro. Top down and the morning air in your hair!

Even back then, a coupe with such dynamic elegance simply had to be able to succeed with the top down. Legend has it that Henry Ford II, asked by his staff why he had a Maserati Ghibli in his garage, replied, “It’s staying there until you produce just as beautiful a Ford.” What he didn’t mention was that it was one of the most expensive cars of its time. Equipped with a 4.7-liter V8 – in special cases, like the Spyder SS, with a 335 hp 4.9-liter version.

Wherever you stop turning the wheel of fortune that is the company’s history, you come across an astonishing wealth and variety of ideas and successful creations, ever since Ernesto, Bindo and Ettore Maserati founded their workshop in Bologna in 1914 and brother Mario, the only one with no technical talent, adapted the trident of the local Neptune fountain as the company logo. Here another illuminating flash into a storied past: Between 1942 and 1945, Maserati produced batteries, accumulators and small electric trucks, helping the brand through difficult times. Today, these can be seen as an early preview of the distant future. Maserati’s many motorsport achievements were extremely tangible back then, as the company had already built up a successful works team in the 1920s, culminating in the 1957 drivers’ world championship title for Juan Manuel Fangio. By 1954 the company had already celebrated five hundred victories.

Or, as a modern person of the twenty-first century, we could forget all reminiscences and continue to let our loved ones sleep peacefully into the day as a responsible family man should by opting for the 
GranCabrio Folgore: iconic design with an open sky above and toe-curlingly quiet thanks to its electric powertrain. With practiced movements, we disconnect the charging cable from the wallbox and silently release the car onto the open road.

The battery modules manufactured at the Mirafiori Battery Hub in Turin are stacked in a T-bone arrangement as centrally as possible around the middle tunnel, a layout that offers the best possible handling and makes it possible to build the lowest electric car in the world so far. And now, as we head out to the open road and enter the morning realm of bends and curves, other senses start kicking in, leading us to recall the original press text from Maserati: “In terms of the sound experience in the electric model, innovative engineering work has been carried out: the natural acoustic dynamics of the electric motors driven by the inverters have been digitally shaped and integrated with the typical sound taken from the Maserati V8 tradition.”

Never before has a fabric roof opened so easily and elegantly. With a single gesture of the right hand, you set the electric roof in motion, even with the speedometer approaching 50 km/h. Back in the airstream, the fear of cold winds grabbing the back of your neck in the morning vanishes, as tempered air flows gently from the neck blower built into the seat, finely modulated in three stages via a button in the comfort display.

Bear in mind that wind has always played a role in Maserati’s naming scheme, ever since the Spyder version of the Mistral designed by Frua was launched in 1964 as an elegant reinterpretation of the hatchback coupe, just as the GranCabrio today is a clear reference to the GranTurismo coupe.

From the wind to the winding road to the turning point. Because Maserati is ushering in nothing less than a turning point in time. All future models are to spring from the Folgore, the lightning bolt, which, in a way, will lead us to experience a certain twilight of the gods when Neptune’s trident, Maserati’s symbol since the beginning, suddenly turns out to be Zeus’s lightning bolt, the Folgore, thundering over Olympus. Let’s hope he remains merciful when we get the MC20 Cielo out of the garage for our early morning drive, the butterfly-winged Spyder version of the truly elemental MC20 Coupe, preferably in a matching finish. To quote Maserati once more: “Oceanic hues inspired by the sea and restless energy beneath the waves are captured in Acquamarina, one of the mesmerizing colors offered by Maserati. As it reflects the sky and the sea shimmering and shifting in motion, it is always restless, always moving forward.”

Wouldn’t that make for a wonderful conclusion to our celebratory speech?

→ You can now read more about electrification and the history of Maserati in the ramp.special Maserati!