History of Maserati Documentary

[Music] this is a fabulous car to drive he's like you drive a big truck to own this car and make me proud it's a stylish but understated it's not flashed it flies I would never sell the car except you for my son that's me ready I'm hungry the Maserati badge represents one thing a passion for racing today if you buy the modern air-conditioned leather-clad Maserati the supercar for the 90s you're actually buying heritage you're buying a racing heritage which goes right back to the 1920s [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] the company was actually founded by Alfieri maserati who had a passion for racing and opened a workshop dealing with a whole variety of cars including the famous is sort of Fraschini this was in 1914 but it wasn't long before he began Billy's own cars and developing his own racing heritage Alfieri having a good eye for marketing asked his brother Mario to design a badge he based this on the trend from a statue in the Market Square of the hometown of Bologna and that is still there for you to see today in 1926 the first car to wear the badge made a sensational debut at Targa Florio that was in fact the famous tipo 26 [Music] [Music] this is a 1931 Maserati the model is a 26 M it's two and a half litre straight a supercharged Grand Prix car this cars history starts with Tim Birkin who is best known as one of the Bentley boys having won at Lamar and so forth Tim bought this car 1931 from the factory and raced it first in the French Grand Prix finished fifth took the car to Brooklyn's set the mountain course lap record at Brooklands with this car the car then went on to whitney straight whitney straight was a twenty-year-old college student at Cambridge University he wasn't allowed to have a private motor car so he had a grump remaster ah t4 racing and a twin-engine aeroplane with which to go to Brooklyn's back in those days when you ran at Brooklands many of the races were handicap races the slow cars could go straight through one part of the course the medium speed cars had to go through a bit of a wiggle and the very fast cars had to go through a rather sharp chicane and that color of the tail showed you where you had to go and that allowed the other drivers to know what the guy in front was going to do and the whitetails were the fastest cars this car had a white tail for Brooklands and whitney straight left the tail white during the entire time he owned the car this is a fabulous car to drive you can drive it as a street car you can sort of putter around in it but when you want to make this car go it flies this car will easily run on a straight-line basis with a modern Porsche it's got a top speed of 142 miles an hour it is a much much faster car than what a lot of people would ever believe the engine in this car is a twin overhead cam straight-8 supercharged engine the suspension is very modern for its time it's a fabulous piece of engineering [Music] you're gonna know what these cars are all about you've got to see them in motion you've got to hear them you've got to smell the castor oil smell the exhausts and so forth even though I've owned this car for quite some time now I still thrill at just looking at the badge on the bonnet in fact one of my favorite things to do with this car is the in a quiet place when there's nobody around park the car to stand back and just look at it the next car to be produced was the v4 which was the first ever racing car to have a 16 cylinder engine this car was put in for the speed trials and it achieved the world record for 10 kilometers at Cremona at a speed of 246 km/h the death of Alfieri in 1932 left the company without a leader but the family pulled together and they were quite determined that they were going to succeed on their own the face of Motor Racing Grand Prix cars changed in 1934 with the advent of the Germans appearing on the scene with Auto Union and Mercedes Maserati being a small company not with an open checkbook from the Bundesbank like the German Titans decided that their efforts were better spent on producing what Charette racing cars mid-1930s maserati was still not marked in their cast to an extent because they were selling them on the back of the Grand Prix success so in 1936 when the 6cm was introduced at the Milan Auto Show and caused a sensation the subsequent demand was so great they couldn't keep pace with it ironically though they were still making no money [Music] in early 1937 the AUSA family from modern ER purchased the Maserati Company from the brothers and the direction of the AUSA family the Maserati company produced an enormous number of successful racing cars sports cars and rape cars their achievements in these fields culminated in the year of 1957 when Juan Manuel Fangio won the World Championship in a maserati 250f at the same time the company had entered into the world sportscar championship the car was called the Munster and it was a 450s this is for 50 years maserati built in 1957 an extremely room very difficult to drive if you drive the car on a low RPM is like you drive a big truck it's very difficult to handle very heavy when the RPM goes higher I mean four or five thousand rpm the impression is to drive a 400-horsepower loca riders like Fanjul like moss like pariah they didn't like it to ride the car because it was very difficult to handle it's a very light car you have the big engine in front and in the back side you just tank so when you have a full tank in the back you have 250 litre of gasoline and 424 liters of oil but during the race when the gasoline goes down the car becomes very light in the back side so it's quite difficult to handle [Music] you're in the middle of mania of two years ago I had the stealing mosque close to my car we were waiting to start it was looking the car and remembering when he was racing this car in 1957 and my question to him was how he could handle the car on road races and the judge told me well we had to cross our fingers and go that was the only way to run this car [Applause] one of my best friends with this car was in Monza and you put the fifth gear and you reach 300 or more kilometers an hour you go under the bridge before the Ascari turn and there you have the real thrill because you don't know if you can brake or not if you can make the turn or you go in the same you know why you know why I turn because I was thinking how much it's going to cost to refurbish the car I said at the last minute they say ok like [Music] in the last race of the season for the World Sportscar Championship the Caracas Venezuelan Grand Prix the entire team 450 s's was destroyed this sadly meant a that Maserati was second not first in the championship and secondly it meant they had no sports cars left at all together with the financial problems that they were suffering in the factory and the fact they had no sports cars the company was drew from official works racing however this was to be the dawn of a new era of a Maserati at Geneva merged shown in 1957 the Maserati unveiled a new motor car which was totally different from what had been seen before this car was 3500 GT my name is a doll 4c and I have the same name of my grandfather who bought the factory in 1937 from as rowdy brothers I have to 3500 GT vinyl Spyder one is the prototype and the other is a 1960 production car the prototype was first shown at the Turin show in 59 and the production began in the early months of 1960 the cars are a bit different no one part is interchangeable between both cars the special things of the prototypes are different grille different side ones dashboards seats the the purpose was to check the taste of the customers and to decide how to do the production car [Music] to all this garden to drive this car make me proud of what my family did for the major artists on the 3500 GT was a very important car in Maserati story because was a big commercial success and therefore along with the company to become a producer of GT cars when I was a little boy six or seven years old I had small Maseratis because at that time the Maserati did there's more production of electric car for child and I have driven myself some of these cars the pleasure for me is to drive a car built from my family don't think there are many person in the world they could be so lucky as I am [Music] in 1959 the world still had recognized achievements of the Maserati and racing and there were a number of people who approached the factory to try to persuade them to re-enter the arena once again the factory actually said no they would not as works teams ever enter cars but they did agree to design cars for private teams and in that time they produced the very famous tipo 60 and 61 always known as The Birdcage driven by very many famous drivers and many great race successes in 1963 they introduced the Mistral and the Quattroporte which was the very first four-door saloon car and were produced by Maserati the introduction of the strange beast the Quattroporte was a desperate attempt to try and make some money at a time of serious financial difficulties about to be bailed out by Citarum so they decided that it'd have to market it as a luxury car so for the first time with Maserati we get a brochure with a thick card cover onion skin inserts and very significantly the first page contains motoring heritage with pictures of 1920's racing cars by the time 1971 had come around Citroen had decided that they should buy the total shareholding of the Maserati company from the Aussie family over this transitional period one of the models still being produced by Maserati was a sensational two-seater coupe a and Spyder powered by a 5 liter engine which many people considered to be a rival of the Ferrari Daytona this car was the Maserati Ghibli [Music] this car is really Bleus s Maserati naturally it was made in 1973 one of the very last made because in 73 they only made 5 cars like this and it has a very powerful engine 335 horsepower it is a very speed car very fast 280 kilometers of top speed and the car is quite in good condition you see original color original interior and so on I like it very much [Music] [Music] I Drive the car at least every month it's like meeting an old friend after a lot of time you don't think to the friend for many days and then when you meet him or her everything is like the last time and not only for the power of the car or for the end link or for the braking also for the total sensation you are in a little world and outside things are not so important when you're driving fast you have to be very careful but if you are likely to find at the right place to drive fast you have all the same to be very careful because the speed gives you a sensation of power and gives you a total misunderstanding of what happens around you everything is moving slowly in comparison with you so you have to be very very careful but when the power is very strong and you push the throttle with this car it's by the sensation this cows are really special they were handmade and there is in the shape of the car and is in the technicals of the car you can see the people who made them can you see that in modern cars [Music] I will never sell the car except if my son tells me daddy I'm hungry that's one reason following the game the era of the mid-engine sports car appeared the Maseratis contribution to this new layout of a motor car was represented in the Maserati Bora and the Maserati Merak it's a 1972 Maserati Bora left-hand drive and this cars really the first it's fruit of the of the tie-up between Citroen Maserati and there's a lot of Citroen influence on the car the idea was to combine a lot of the front engine sort of GT touring characteristics of a front-engine car into a mid-engine car this wasn't a racer for the road the whole idea was to produce an elegant and civilised car that somebody could travel to the South France in but gaining all the mid-engine advantages of the styling and of the of the handling and maneuverability effectively [Music] what I like about it's a stylish but understated it's not flash which I enjoy because I like to be able to drive it into the local town and get out of the car and and people not turn around say what a plonker [Music] one of us comes with the cars to sit in on the long journey cuz there's a reclining teach our little touches like the pedal box moves in a knight on a hydraulic ram so that you sit in the car and instead of moving the seat back from floors you press a button and all the pedals glide towards you there you are sitting on a motorway 80 90 miles an hour and you press the wrong knob when the accelerator pedal comes towards you and if your foots in the right position you go off us but you know it can be entertaining really you switch the engine on and of course being a v8 it's a shudders into life a friend of mine who was always joke that he always tell when my car's coming because his cup of tea starts rattling on the table because the engine got so much talk but you it's just very easy to drive in traffic it doesn't overheat so you can potter so most journeys in any car start off in traffic but once you get on the open road and use more than 3,000 revs I hold the whole thing changes you suddenly realize we've got our engine from the 450s racer in the back if the Ghibli moreover the cars of the 70s then the Biturbo was the car of the 80s for Maserati the marketing the Biturbo was significantly different to previous Maseratis what happened was although the car looks like a four-door afeared it drove incredibly fast and it had to be marketed to the supercar buyer [Music] [Applause] [Music] in early 1997 fear auto SBA decided that maserati would be better managed through the joint division with ferrari small volume produces understand each other better than large volume produces understanding small volume produces this can only be a good thing for maserati la legend continuous [Music]

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Views: 38,244

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Id: 3OgApWRKscE

Length: 23min 45sec (1425 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 27 2018