When Maserati started sending out pictures of the GranTurismo in advance of its official debut at the 2007 Geneva Show, I was impressed by what a fine job Italian design company Pininfarina had done on the shape.What I wasn't ready for was how much better the GranTurismo looks in three dimensions. This is a personal thing, of course, but I like its combination of beauty and aggression very much, and if you're of a similar mind you might think that this goes a long way to justifying the £78,500 list price (or perhaps even the near-six figure sum you'll spend if you play free and easy with the options list).The soul of the GranTurismo is contained in the familiar 4.2-litre V8 engine, which in this application produces 405bhp and drives through a six-speed automatic gearbox whose shifts, even at full throttle, are smooth to the point of being miraculous. In gentle running the engine seems quite subdued, but if you pour in the whole can of chillis and let it rev to its maximum of around 7000rpm, it finds a new voice and starts to sound like the last three minutes of a Rossini overture.If you're going to take advantage of this, you'd be well advised to make sure you've pressed a certain button. It's labelled Sport, and it firms up the damping of the Skyhook suspension system. In normal mode, Skyhook is fine for conditions up to and including driving through a quiet village at 15mph in search of the local cheese shop, but for anything more ambitious you need to hit the Sport button and make sure it stays hit.Unless you do this, you'll find that Skyhook is seriously under-damped, to the point where it makes the GranTurismo feel uncertain of itself even on, for example, the 50mph sections of the A1. In this condition I also tried spanking along a twisty country road, and I would describe it for you if my psychiatrist hadn't told me it was one of those memories I shouldn't dwell on too much.Sport mode it is, then. Yes, there's a deterioration in ride quality, but ride quality isn't the GranTurismo's strong point in any case, and in a car like this I don't mind losing some of it in return for extra confidence that the chassis will cope with the power of the engine.The Sport button has another function: it makes the automatic transmission much more willing to change down a gear, or to hold on to the gear it's in during light acceleration. This makes the car seem fussy, and during this test I preferred to take up the option of changing gears manually, partly because I like that better anyway and partly to keep the noise down when I wasn't in a particular hurry.The GranTurismo can still force you into action, though. Sometimes you might want to use a lot of throttle without changing down a gear, and you can do that as long as you don't let the pedal touch the kickdown switch at the bottom of its travel. If this happens (and it's easy to do without meaning to), the gearbox immediately drops down as many gears as it can get away with, and there you are roaring forwards at 7000rpm again.At least the interior is more restful. It has a very high quality feel to it, and as standard it comes upholstered in Poltrona Frau leather. If I were to become a Maserati customer I'd be very careful about choosing the hue of the hide - the bright red option is a bit too violent for my tastes - but apart from that I don't have any complaints.Well, maybe just one. The GranTurismo is a four-seater, and Maserati insists that it will carry four adults. This may be true, but they would have to be carefully selected, with an average height of about five foot six. The rear seats are works of wonder, and offer magnificent support, but no mature adult I know will be able to stay in them for any length of time if there's a plus-six-footer sitting immediately ahead.I haven't tried this, but I imagine it would also be possible to feel quite claustrophobic in the back, since there isn't a lot of glass area. That has an inevitable effect on rear visibility for the driver, but it's no worse than you'd expect in a sleek coupé. More concerning is the thickness of the windscreen pillars, which block an alarming amount of the potential view forwards and oblige you to take great care when leaving a road junction.If you're not a likely GranTurismo customer yourself and you're just reading this to see what's going on, the cost of ownership will seem appalling. Combined fuel economy is just over 19mpg (real-world figures are likely to be much worse if you plan to use the engine to anything like its full potential) and a CO2 rating of 345g/km means that a GranTurismo owner will end up paying enough in tax and congestion charges to build a new hospital.On the other hand, while these numbers do not represent the best in class or anything like it, they don't put the GranTurismo at a major disadvantage compared with many of its rivals either. And if the depreciation figures for the Quattroporte (supplied by Maserati but taken from the March 2008 edition of Glass's Guide) have any relevance to the GranTurismo, it may retain a pleasing amount of its original value when resale time comes along. Engine 4244 cc, 8 cylinders Power 405 bhp @7100 rpm Torque 339 ib/ft @4750 rpm Transmission 6 speed semi-auto Fuel/CO2 19.7 mpg / 335 g/km Acceleration 0-62mph: 5.2sec Top speed 177 mph Price From £81136.00 approx Release date 01/11/2007
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