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| Maserati
Merak |
Broadcast
dates : 17th July 2005
23rd July 2005 |
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The
brothers Maserati, Carlo and Alfieri, began their
careers in the early 20th century, with the first
Maserati car racing in the 1926 Mille Miglia.
Maserati won the world F1 championship with Fangio in
1957, but by the 1960s, control of the company had
passed to Citroen. Which was when this car came to
being, now owned by Craig Anderson of Bryanston.
Giorgetto Giugiaro was the stylist of the Merak, the
man who styled one of the icons of the 1970s, the
Volkswagen Golf.
It’s a deceptively modern shape despite being
designed in 1972 as the larger-engined Bora.
The V6 Merak is reminiscent of the Lamborghini Muira,
early Countach models and even the Ferrari
308.
Striking Campagnola alloy wheels peg this SS model
firmly in the late 1970s, as does the knife-edge
bodywork.
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Yet
this was designed as a practical supercar, with
two-plus-two seating, and a large luggage space in the
nose.
Classic supercars are all about detailing. These
machines come from a hand-built lineage, before modern
production techniques were applied to cars like the
Ferrari 360, and, for that matter, the latest Maserati
GTs.
Pop-up headlights were not new even in the 1970s, but
they enabled extremely sleek lines.
Inside, the dashboards were made of wood or metal and
covered in vinyl. And no supercar of that era would be
complete without a dazzling array of gauges and
switchgear to give it a jet-fighter look.
The seats are sleek delicate items, not unlike the
slip-on Italian shoes favoured by the playboys of that
era.
The Bora V8 gave way to the V6 for this
"economy" model. Yet by the late 1970s, the
SS model had been tweaked to produce some two-hundred
and twenty horsepower, or a hundred and sixty-five
kilowatts.
The engine was a quad-cam design, quite wild for those
days, and wilder SS camshafts and improved breathing
made it a "goer" despite its modest three-litre
capacity.
The mid-mounted engine also featured some attractive
intake plumping which was a forerunner of later
Ferraris. Some complex hydraulics were thanks to
Citroen influence.
The Merak was quick despite a heavyish weight of some
sixteen-hundred kilograms. The low frontal area gave
it a top speed in excess of two-hundred and forty
kilometres-per-hour, and it could sprint to a hundred
in under seven seconds.
It had a V6 howl similar in character to the Ferrari
Dino. In fact, so successful was the Merak that over
eighteen-hundred units were built over a ten-year
lifespan.
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