Just the cars for a tough economy
(If you happen to be rich as Croesus and shopping for a Maserati or an Aston Martin)
The Aston Martin V8 Vantage and the Maserati GranTurismo S are beautiful, irrelevant cars - an evenly matched set of luxury-performance cuff links.
The brief on them both for 2009 is simple: more horsepower. The V8 Vantage gets a bigger engine (4.7 vs. 4.3 liters) and an 11 percent bump in overall bluster, to 420 horsepower. The GranTurismo S, the performance variant of the company's grand touring coupe, is fitted with a 4.7-liter, 440-horsepower version of the Ferrari-built V8. Both are front-engine, rear-drive coupes with automated six-speed gearboxes. Both travel in excess of 180 miles per hour and cost around $130,000.
It's amazing that they feel so different.
One is English, a cold glass of British gin set on fire and pitched through the window of respectable people's houses. The other is Italian, a lyric of lust and privilege played on purloined lyre.
But first, a word on the zeitgeist: These are good times for super-luxury sports cars. Why? Because as the global economy pounds itself to the flatness Thomas Friedman describes, vast amounts of wealth are being generated in the emerging plutocracies of Brazil, Russia, India, and China. In 2007, for example, India minted 23,000 new millionaires and China 70,000, according to Merrill Lynch's most recent report on world wealth. Aston Martin, Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Maserati are planting dealerships in places like Moscow, Beijing, and Shanghai as fast as the concrete will dry. After all, callow young men with ridiculously large watches must be served.
Things aren't nearly so boom-boom here in the States, and yet six-figure sports car sales remain robust, for obvious reasons. Think about it. Whatever a luxury sports car is supposed to signify - exclusion, privilege, wealth, power - all of these things are magnified in hard times. If you savor the teeth-gnashing envy of those less fortunate, an audacious touring car like the Mazzer or the Aston will have them falling over in the bread lines. If you wanted to twist the knife in all those whinnying greeniks, you could find no more stylish a blade than these.
Of the two, the Maserati is the greater outrage. Nearly five meters (16 feet) of sinister elegance, this is the most beautiful Maserati of the modern era. The S edition comes with a number of aero and cosmetic mods, including 20-inch wheels, flashier side sills, and a more pronounced trunk-lid spoiler. Exotic-car ornithologists can also look for the GT-S's distinctive red mono-bloc calipers inside the front wheels.
That all sounds so clinical. The fact is that the sight of this car makes your heart go thump like digitalis with a whiskey chaser.
In the hill country of Emilia-Romagna, the Mazzer feels like what it is - a big, powerful car, more fullback than wide receiver, a car that rejoices in long high-speed runs but tends to feel increasingly cramped and frustrated as the corners tighten. Actually, in relative terms, it's not even that fast. The
The GT-S is a grand touring car like Steinways are grand pianos: big, summary, self-defined. The larger-displacement engine pours out torque like maple syrup from a fire hose. It's not a raw kind of thrust; there's always a sense of unstrained reserve. The car's up-rated sports seats are perfect, the onboard electronics excellent, and the cabin - with the pleasant reek of corporate-cousin Ferrari everywhere - sweetened with refinement.
The one hint of the family's famous temper is the car's exhaust bypass switch. Press the "sport" button and pneumatic valves close off the mufflers, giving the car, essentially, a straight-pipe exhaust. This has the same aural effect as throwing a couple of rabid bobcats in the trunk. Bombing into a corner, downshifting like mad, the growling, snarling, feral overruns will make you misty.
The V8 Vantage is an interesting case. Like its presumed nemesis, the Porsche 911, the V8 Vantage is a slowly evolving creature - which itself suggests a degree of confidence, even self-satisfaction. The exterior is virtually unchanged since its debut in 2005. The car's interior gets a slight freshening with a new center-stack console (unfortunately, the multifunction controller is all but unreachable behind the standard six-speed gearshift).
Out on the road, however, the Aston feels more committed to the cause of adrenaline.
This bored-and-stroked version of the Ford-block V8 is more eager and elastic, responsive, more there. Overall torque is up 15 percent, to 347 pound-feet. Buttoned to the now-smarter and quicker automated paddle-shifter - the best $4,000 you can spend on this car - the Aston feels coltish and edgy when pushed, but surprisingly sedate at low speed. Aston's engineers have managed to tame the car's low-speed driveline snatch, which is that jerking behavior when the car is puttering along in traffic.
If the Aston is a fencing foil to the Mazzer's saber, no wonder. The British car is 20 inches shorter and a whopping 541 pounds lighter.
These days, the American car market seems like a late-night rave at which someone suddenly cut the music and turned on all the lights, leaving revelers blinking and baffled. But as these cars show, in other places in the world, the party goes on.
