In part two, Nathan revisits a £10k Maserati temptation – and wonders whether he escaped disaster.
One of the major sins is coveting. Especially when you already own something special. But we’ve all done it.
This is the second of my stories about automotive near-misses, where I remember those times when I came close to something truly ruinous – or was it a case of foregoing something wonderful? The first in the series was a BMW M535i (you can read that here), but this one was, if anything, more risky. I’m sure we all have similar stories, so please share your near-misses below.
Maserati 3200 GT
It’s coming up to ten years with my Alfa Romeo 147 GTA. It’s the longest I’ve ever owned a car and, after a spell when I was considering selling it, I decided to keep it. It rewarded this declaration of loyalty by catching fire in January – thankfully put out quickly – developing a host of niggles since and now requiring an expensive cambelt service. Perhaps this is simply revenge for a weekend’s dalliance I had with another Italian temptation not long after I bought the GTA.
The 3200 was dark metallic blue, smelled of expensive leather, was styled by Giugiaro and even thinking about its boomerang rear lights makes the rest of me distinctly un-boomerang-y. Ahem.
The maths were quite stark. I’d paid £7000 for the GTA, yet for another three large I could own a Maserati. Not just any Maserati, either, but a manual 3200 GT. A 3.2-litre twin-turbocharged V8, 370bhp and looks capable of invoking such sordid thoughts that it’s a surprise Westminster Council didn’t try to ban it.
This particular car was up in Manchester and, with a friend living there, I had the perfect excuse to walk on the wild side. I was greeted off the train by the owner, a curious man who insisted on taking several pictures of me during my encounter with the car. When I saw it, poking out from its garage sheath ready for me to gorge my eyes on, all thoughts of a certain silver hot hatch disappeared. I wanted it.
Then we got to the gorgeous Enrico Fumia-designed interior. Or it would have been gorgeous had the cream leather not looked rather like the surface of the moon and smelled mustier than the forbidden part of my dad’s shed.
Never mind. Leather can be cleaned. Leather can be repaired. I was buying a twin-turbo Maserati V8 for £10,000, after all. Then I drove it.
Now, I love Maseratis – I currently own two – and I have the utmost respect for 3200 GT owners. Not least for the way they drive them. The throttle response can be on the piranha side of nippy and, if the throttle potentiometer or electronic throttle body isn’t entirely happy, the relationship between pedal movement and boost can feel more like a rough suggestion.
This one wasn’t the worst I’d driven… but then it started to rain. And rain in only the way Manchester knows how.
As I pulled onto a sliproad to unleash Modena’s finest multi-boosted V8, I found I wasn’t really going anywhere. The engine was making a lot of noise, the steering wheel was writhing about and… ah yes. The tyres were fizzing through the water. It turned out they were from a Chinese brand I’d never heard of and appeared to date from the Jurassic period.
At this point I realised the car was probably not quite as good as I’d hoped. There’s an old theory that if you can’t buy the previous owner, buy the tyres the car is sitting on. But still, what’s a set of tyres compared with 370bhp for £10,000? Rather than take the scenic route, I slithered the 3200 back home, somehow managing to experience understeer and oversteer at roughly the same time. That’s when I went through the paperwork.
I knew it had covered relatively few miles during the previous decade – around 2000. What I hadn’t realised was that it hadn’t been serviced for 12 years. When I queried this, the owner seemed perplexed by my concern. He barely used it, you see.
Then came the kicker, something of which he seemed particularly proud. He’d been fiddling around with the interior electrics to install his own mood lighting for the cabin. It’s not as if ageing Italian electrics need much inducement to misbehave.
I returned home, and I’ve owned the 147 GTA ever since.
Why I still think of it
When you consider that almost any secondhand car is going to need a bit of work – why else would somebody be selling it? – tyres, a service and some TLC for the interior don’t sound too frightening.
But the Maserati 3200 GT is no ordinary secondhand car, in both very good and potentially very expensive ways. The later 4200 and GranSport are more accomplished machines, with their naturally aspirated Ferrari-derived V8s, but they can’t quite match the full-blooded twin-turbo surge of the 3200.
There’s something gloriously unhinged about the way it gathers itself and goes. It’s fundamentally more exciting in the same way that owning a young greyhound is. All of the speed first, with the logistics and physics considered later.
Then there are the looks. Those boomerang LED lights. That low nose. The extravagant curves and tiny details that make almost everything else from the period seem desperately inhibited. I still think it’s one of the best-looking GT cars ever built.
Curiously, I can’t even torture myself with its subsequent appreciation. Hagerty currently values a fair 3200 GT at £8000 and a good one at £11,300, with £23,000 reserved for concours territory. In other words, these remain extraordinarily cheap cars for what they are.
Reality check
There was, however, one tiny problem with my £10,000 dream Maserati: almost everything I’d discovered about that particular example was telling me to run.
The 3200’s twin-turbo V8 demands proper maintenance irrespective of how few miles it covers. Cambelts are time-sensitive as well as mileage-sensitive, so a 12-year servicing gap is not the reassuring statement the seller seemed to think it was. The engine also uses a timing chain at the rear, while oil leaks, sensors and ageing electrical connections can all cause headaches.
Then there are the famous electronic throttle body and accelerator potentiometer problems. Specialist rebuilds and improved components mean these are much less terrifying than they once were, but poor running needs investigating rather than accepting as ‘they all do that’.
Manual cars bring another particularly sobering check: excessive crankshaft end float can mean major engine work. Clutches aren’t immortal either.
Add perished suspension bushes, difficult-to-source trim and lights, ageing electrics and the possibility of corrosion around arches and panel edges and suddenly four cheap tyres look like the least of your worries.
The 3200 isn’t inherently an automotive hand grenade. A properly maintained one can be hugely rewarding. But buying one that had essentially been hibernating without servicing for 12 years, on ancient tyres and with enthusiastically modified electrics? That would have been optimism bordering on performance art.
Summing up
I did scratch the Maserati itch in the end, with the car I actually wanted all along – a Ghibli Cup. But the 3200 GT still occupies a sizeable part of my brain.
The driving experience lives up to all those journalistic clichés surrounding the word ‘flawed’, but by golly you’ll have fun along the way. The instant throttle, sudden boost, slightly unruly chassis and sheer theatre are all part of what makes the thing so memorable. Well, until the bills turn up, that is.
And perhaps that particular car taught me something useful. A Maserati 3200 GT for £10,000 was tempting. A Maserati 3200 GT that had gone 12 years without a service, was wearing ancient mystery tyres and had been treated to some home-made electrical improvements was a slightly different proposition.
But was I right to swerve it and embrace the GTA life, or should I have wound up the boost and got on with it? Let me know.
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