Elvis Presley had a thing for Italian sports cars (among other drugs). A certain urban legend holds that he once actually shot one of them when it failed to start. Rumor has passed that the low-slung shot of pure adrenaline was a Maserati. It wasn’t. It was a Pantera, a strange Italo-American hybrid of a car that featured a body designed Tom Tjaarda of Ghibli with a 351 Cleveland engine; in other words, a bastard.
A Maserati of the same era would have bitten Elvis back. As I learned this weekend, the great Maseratis have not changed much over the years. If I learned anything from my 24-hour affair with a 2005 Maserati Quattroporte in a special-order Ferrari blue, it is that any rock star who has taken leave of his senses has no place in this car. This car requires all your wits. Because few four-door sedans in the world now deliver quite the same combination of speed, handling, luxury, and pure patzo as this purebred.
In my humble opinion, the Quattroporte also negates the “world’s fastest” four door sedan, the Bentley Flying Spur. For one thing, this British car is actually a German car. It is an accommodating barge designed by Germans with British flavoring. Or, in other words, another bastard frequently driven by bastards. Yeah, it's fast and luxurious but it's also well over five thousand pounds and basically a VW Phaeton.
The Maserati is a car conceived in Modena, Italy, the birthplace of the “sacred monster," where Mr. Ferrari's bloodlines still run through every build. That is why most people with the money to afford this car may fail to appreciate it.
The charms of the 2005 Quattroporte are mainly experienced after spending time with the owner's manual and some trial-and-error paddle shifting above 7100 RPMs. I mean this car accelerates into the RPMs the faster you go. It also takes a certain knowledge of driving dynamics to fully test its nearly perfect 47/52 weight distribution, which makes it about the worst five-minute test drive in recent memory.
For one thing, this car hates automatic, constantly reminding you that driving can and should be more fun. It also sacrifices a few driver sight lines for sheer automotive sexiness. It even rings and dings too much as it calibrates a variety of racing-inspired computers before settling into drive (which you must depress the brake to engage, like many high-performance cars). Lastly, the sheer beauty of its caramel colored Poltrona Frau leather and symmetrically grained wood on the dash and doors leave you thinking twice about drinking and spilling a cup of coffee in the cabin.
In other words, all the things that can spoil a quick test drive for an impatient, impertinent financial stiff or corpulent rock star past his prime. Except for Elvis, this is a blessing because when I am reunited with The King someday, I will tell him that while some cars are worth shooting, others are worth driving.
On earth as in Rock and Roll heaven.
And waiting down in the parking lot outside the Sears Imported Auto Store.