Well, today was a bittersweet day: I sold my Maserati, and the new owners came and took it away. For the past four years, for better or worse, I was a Maserati owner; now I am not.
When I was in high school, I went through a period of car mania, coinciding with my obtaining a driver's license. But, being utterly without resources, my interest in cool cars remained theoretical. For the next almost-twenty years, through years of college, law school, and living in apartments with only street parking, I was by necessity (and poverty) restricted to purely utilitarian cars that could sit out on the street throughout a Midwestern winter and would not be targets for thieves or vandals. My interest in cars remained dormant.
After I got married, however, we had a covered garage space, and I finally paid off my student loans and credit cards, and for the first time in my adult life I started to think that hey, maybe I could have a cool, fun car after all. We had a very high-utility SUV for day-to-day use, so when my old ex-mom Mercury Grand Marquis began to be more trouble that it was worth to fix, I looked around for something less practical and more interesting to replace it. I wanted to try a sports car, and I wanted to try a convertible, and so I looked for a vehicle that was both.
During my initial adolescent car phase, I had developed an interest in European sports cars---for some reason, I never really was that into muscle cars or pony cars, although I appreciate them and don't have anything against them. But something about the swoopier, higher-tech cars from across the pond appealed to me. Doing research I discovered several cars that fit my profile, and were within a price range I could reasonably contemplate, including some MGs, Triumphs, Fiats, perhaps some ratty smaller Porsches, and the Alfa Romeo Spider. Seeking out reviews, I noticed that on one site, while most of the reviews of various models were ambivalent, the Alfa owners uniformly expressed enthusiasm for driving their cars. I thought the Spider was pretty cool, and recalled the hallowed name, Pininfarina, from my earlier car phase, so I focused my hunt for one of those.
And I found a fairly nice one at a good price, in Ypsilanti, Michigan, my old stomping ground. An exchange of e-mails and photos, and a deal was struck. I went up on the train and drove it home. It was fun, it was zippy, it was red, it was Italian:
I was having a great time with my Alfa, reveling in sports car ownership, but fool that I was, I didn't know when to leave well enough alone. I became infatuated with all Italian cars; I joined the Ferrari Owners Club to hang out with the Tifosi. And I researched the history of Maserati, a name that everyone knows but nobody seems to know what they actually look like.
Maserati was formed by the five Maserati brothers in the twenties and built race cars through the thirties, with some success, but not enough success to keep the firm solvent: they went broke (for the first of many times) and the brothers were bought out in the late 30s by the Orsi family. They had a contract to stay on for ten years, but WWII ate up most of that, and in IIRC 1947 they left the company bearing their name, and went on to some further success building small-bore sports cars under the OSCA brand.
Meanwhile, the Orsi still built racing cars but over time started to branch out into street cars---first street versions of their racers, but by the late 50s they were building a series of high-speed touring cars. They were fast, luxurious, and exclusive.
Maserati 5000GT
It is worth noting that while many people lump Maserati in with Ferrari conceptually, in fact they are an apples-to-oranges comparison. Ferrari made sports cars: brutal little cars that were little removed from road racers, and even later when the connection was not as clear, the classic Ferrari models were still sports cars, designed to carve up the corners as quickly and efficiently as possible, and with minimal concessions to civilized niceties. Maserati road cars, on the other hand, were intended to go long distances, fast, in luxury. "Grand Touring" in the truest sense. So while Ferraris and Maseratis may have had some superficial design similarities, they had very different mission statements.
Despite a string of beautiful and powerful classic GT machines, including the 5000GT, the Mistral, and the Ghibli, the Orsis eventually sold Maserati to (gasp) the French: in the late 60s, French car maker Citroen bought the company. This resulted in some interesting technical facets to Maserati cars of the seventies, such as an elaborate hydraulic system that powered everything from the brakes to the retractable headlights and earned the ire of mechanics for its sheer weirdness, although cars like the Bora and Merak continued Maserati's string of jaw-dropping design triumphs.
Maserati Ghibli
But Citroen, too, sold the insolvency-prone company, to Alessandro de Tomaso, the guy who brought the world the Pantera. And he had a different idea of what Maserati should be.
Whereas previously Maserati had competed with the likes of Aston Martin, building very high-end, exclusive, special cars, de Tomaso introduced a new series of cars aimed at a different market niche, that occupied by the smaller BMW and Mercedes cars. This was the Biturbo series. Where prior Maserati GT cars had been swoopy and sleek, Biturbos were stubby and angular. Where prior Maseratis had been expensive and exclusive, Biturbos were---well, still expensive but not quite as expensive, and although they were still exclusive in that relatively few people had them, it was not quite the "you can't afford it" exclusivity of Maserati of yore.
This obvious move down-market did nothing to endear the Biturbo line to old-school Maserati enthusiasts, and although the Biturbo family are far and away the best-selling Maseratis ever and they kept the company in the black for many years, they remain the unloved stepchildren of the Italian exotic-car universe. Although I don't know the exact cause-effect relationship, in the early 90s Maserati left the U.S. market. The early Biturbos had some teething problems; by 1990 or so they had pretty much been worked out, but we in the U.S. never saw the best Biturbo derivatives.
After a couple decades (and a joint venture with Chrysler that produced the TC, essentially a LeBaron tweaked by Maserati, some of which had a Maserati engine), Maserati was sold again, this time to Ferrari, who put out GT cars under the Maserati badge that were basically junior Ferraris, using Ferrari engines and other Ferrari technology, to the joy and applause of the automotive enthusiast world. Ferrari of course acted as if prior Maserati history, particularly the Biturbo era, never happened.
As a result of this history, Biturbos, which were sold in this country from 1984 to 1987 and 1989 to 1991, don't possess the cachet of earlier or later Maseratis, and can be had relatively cheaply---certainly, they are the cheapest model from any exotic car maker to buy. But cachet or no, they are still Maseratis, and to a man smitten with Italian exotic cars, that affordable car dangling before him like low-hanging fruit can be nigh irresistible.
So it was that, when a 1987 Biturbo Spyder showed up on eBay for sale in a nearby suburb, I abandoned reason and judgment, and bought it.
The Maserati Biturbo Spyder I bought.
I wasn't
completely foolish: there were several models of Biturbo and they came in various configurations. They all had a twin-turbocharged V6 and luxurious appointments (the inside of a Biturbo has leather on just about
everything), but among the desired traits were (a) the fuel-injected engine, from 1987 on, as opposed to the earlier carbed model; (b) the five-speed manual transmission, and (c) the convertible body style. The Biturbo that sucked me in had all of these. It was one of the best models to get.
I should also say that actually, notwithstanding the bad press they get, Biturbos are not really bad cars, if they are sorted out and properly maintained. But, here's where the "exotic car" factor comes into play: Biturbos, like other exotic Italian cars, have relatively short maintenance intervals---whereas a typical Toyota can soldier on for tens of thousands of miles without trouble as long as it gets regular oil changes, exotic Italians tend to require extensive (and expensive) maintenance trips to the shop every 15 to 30 thousand miles. Now, for the last ten or fifteen years, many of the people who have bought Biturbos have been stars-in-the-eyes guys with more enthusiasm than money, and it is one thing to be able to afford to buy a Biturbo, and quite another to be able to afford to maintain it. The price of the car is like unto a Honda, but the price of service and parts is like unto a Ferrari. (Well, maybe not
that bad, but not cheap.) Service and parts are more expensive, and required much more often.
As a result, just about every Biturbo still extant suffers from deferred maintenance issues. And that, unfortunately, is a slippery slope. Italian cars in general suffer if they're not driven regularly, so one little problem that sidelines a car for a while can multiply into numerous niggling little problems, which eventually results in disenchantment and the car being sold to somebody else, and the cycle repeats and worsens.
What I now know is this: if you get a Biturbo, plan on spending an amount of money equal to, if not more than, the cost of the car to get it sorted out. The only way to do it right is to go over the car, or have someone who knows them (if you can find such a person---good luck!) go over the car from bumper to bumper, replacing all the belts and hoses, checking and cleaning all the electrical connections, tuning up the engine---if you do that all at once and comprehensively, you can end up with a reasonably reliable, usable car. A sorted Biturbo can be a practical daily driver (if you don't mind it's prodigious thirst for premium gas). (Well, the electrical system---a chronic problem with many Italian cars, but particularly Biturbos---may need more attention; there's a guy who sells rebuilt fuseboxes.)
When I got my Biturbo, I knew that the owner had not been driving it regularly---he told me how it was "for special occasions," which I knew was absolutely wrong. But it seemed to be working fine, so I bought it, and instead of doing a comprehensive overhaul, I just drove it.
And let me tell you, the Biturbo may not be the most desirable Maserati model ever made, but that car was a hell of a lot of fun, and the most comfortable car for long-distance driving I've ever driven. It was a joy to drive on the highway, and even after a slog down to Springfield, I emerged without pains in my legs or back. Compared to modern cars the Biturbo doesn't have that much horsepower, but they way it's delivered is particularly invigorating. And the car cruises at speed effortlessly.
Although it was not strictly speaking a Ferrari, the guys in the Ferrari Owners Club were very welcoming to me. (Actually, you don't need a car at all to join the FOC; appreciation for the Prancing Horse is sufficient. The local FOC group was very nice to interested people.) Here are a couple pictures from FOC drives. The first shows my Biturbo with a gaggle of Ferraris by the Big Mary statue in Hyde Park:
Here's me grinning at the wheel in front of a picturesque church in the north shore suburbs:
But soon, the little mechanical problems, and some bigger mechanical problems, started to crop up. The coolant was overflowing, and a friend familiar with the cars determined that engine compression was getting into the coolant: a bad head gasket. So, full of enthusiasm and confidence, we changed the head gaskets, which is a big job on any car and a real pain in the kiester on a Biturbo. But when we bolted it all back together, it fired up, which was a great feeling. But then it started overheating. That was due to an electrical problem in the circuit that controlled the fans, which proved quite difficult to track down. When I finally got that fixed, it failed emissions testing, and when I addressed that problem at considerable expense, it developed some electrical problem. Throughout all this it was not reliable to drive, so the fun factor went out the window. Finally, about a year ago,
while I was in line to get it emissions tested again, the car just died and would not start again.
Thank God for AAA. I had the car towed back to the garage, and there it sat. I was totally discouraged and could not bring myself to work on it any more.
Meanwhile, I had made another tactical error: I sold my Alfa Spider and bought a project Alfa GTV coupe. The theory was, I could use it on the track. (The Alfa Romeo Owners Club would not let me run in track events with my Spider because it didn't have a roll bar.) But the GTV I bought was a basket case. I thought it would be something I could fix up over time, but as I started working on it I discovered that it had rust in literally every panel of the car, and it was not worth the effort to fix. It had a solid engine, gearbox and rear end, so we pulled them out of it, stripped it of trim etc., and junked the body. I feel a little guilty about that now because those cars (1750 GTVs) are rare and desirable and I wonder whether somebody might not have been willing to save it, but it was in REALLY bad shape.
The Biturbo and "Scruffy", my ratty 1971 Alfa GTV.
But the important thing about getting the GTV, the big mistake I made, was that that gave me t
wo project cars at the same time. And there were not hours in the day or days in the week enough for me to keep on top of both of them. So neither of them really got the attention it deserved, and neither of them was really set right. The Biturbo in particular probably should have had more attention paid to it. If I hadn't been distracted by my other projects, I might have spent enough time and energy on the Biturbo to get ahead of the game with its problems. But I didn't. I watched myself become one of those car owners I would have previously derided, who bought a car and then didn't do the necessary maintenance to keep in running right. The problems with the car were demoralizing, and seeing myself in that light was more demoralizing.
There were further complications with the Alfa, as I tried to move the good parts of Scruffy to a new rolling shell. But, that's really a separate story. To further complicate matters, a friend made me an offer I simply could not refuse on a 1973 Alfa Berlina, a sedan---one of the reasons I was less than totally enthusiastic about the Maserati was that I had noticed that most of the time when we were going somewhere that we could take a fun car, there was usually someone else involved. In retrospect it was foolish of me to buy a two-seater convertible: I couldn't drive it on the track, and I couldn't carry extra passengers. Hence the attractiveness of the Berlina, which had most of the sporting potential of the GTV but had a spacious back seat. So the Berlina was a good acquisition, except that it gave me three old Italian cars, none of which ran. (The Berlina was sans engine.) This was, to put it mildly, a source of occasional marital strife.
One thing I had figured out and resolved to myself was that this year I would get down to one single project car. It didn't take too much thinking to decide that the Berlina would be that car. So, it only remained to put the Maserati and the GTV (well, collection of GTV parts) up for sale. I listed them on enthusiast forums, and put the Biturbo on eBay. It didn't sell, but I did end up making a deal with a guy who saw it there. Today his son and a friend came and picked it up. Here's one of the last pictures I took of it; you can see the corner of the Berlina in the background.
Buying the Biturbo in the first place was a mistake, and I learned a lot from owning it, even if much of what I learned was learned the hard way. But despite my less-than-satisfactory experience as a Biturbo owner, I actually have a fairly positive view of the cars. In fact, if mine had been a sedan instead of a two-seat roadster, I would have kept it and spent the time/money to get it running right. And, I wouldn't say that I might not end up with another Biturbo at some point in the future. And while I didn't think so much of it at the time, in retrospect I will admit I got a bit of a charge out of owning a Maserati. At least, I once owned a Maserati. How many people do
you know who ever owned a Maserati? Never mind the details.
The Fury, 2009 edition, featuring Kelly (aka Mel Content) (bottom row right).
