THE SUBTLE MASERATI

Kimball Gaitely purchased the Maserati not long before lockdown but put a couple of pictures on his Instagram account. He was surprised how many young people found the Maserati cool.

Taking a guess, I’d say this is because they didn’t grow up wanting E-Type Jags or Ferraris. They possibly didn’t have a Lamborghini Countach on their walls because their exotic cars did not have exotic shapes. The cool cars of younger enthusiasts were the hot German and Japanese hatches and saloons of the ’80s and ’90s. These unfussy, conservative three-box and two-box profiles were designed to be practical transport — but the hot versions left the performance cars of earlier generations in their dust. Now that’s cool.

So maybe they have got their eye in on those shapes and, when they see something they don’t recognise like the Maserati, it gets a second look. Maybe they even appreciate the understated but undeniable finesse of the design. It is surely a sign of the car’s renewed appeal that one of these Quattroportes features in the first few seconds of the trailer for the latest in that most car-conscious of film series, the new James Bond.

I know most of my contemporaries used to more stimulating car shapes from Italy and especially from its designer, Marcello Gandini, who drew the Lamborghini Countach, Diablo,