WORK IN PROGRESS – A very short video on social media was enough to make Maserati fans into raptures. A few seconds, one Maserati Shamal a little more muscular than normal shot from above, an alternation of psychedelic lights and that’s it. “I’ll be back (after the summer holidays)”, reads the text of one of the latest posts that appeared on the Maserati Instagram page Fuoriserie. Almost as if it were the new vintage jewel just included in the customization program born from the collaboration between the Maserati Style Center and Garage Italy, the Milanese atelier founded by Lapo Elkann and recently acquired by the Swiss holding Youngtimers, of which the Attorney’s heir has become one of the main shareholders.
> In the photo above a frame of the video posted on Instagram. Above the drawing that anticipates the restomod version of the Shamal released a few months ago.
ITALIAN CRAFTSMANSHIP – In the creative spaces of the division Fuoriserie the customizations of the Maserati of yesterday and today are declined in thousands of possible combinations. To help the customer orient himself in the restyling process of his car, every single modification of the bodywork and passenger compartment is included in a concept of restoration – more or less conservative, more or less adhering to the car’s design specifications – which is divided into three different collections: Corse, Unica and Futura. The result is often surprising, especially on the models of the 80s, children of the management branded Alejandro De Tomaso, dotted with fast and passionate cars like the winds whose name they bear, but sometimes not exactly up to the quality standards that had contributed. to build the myth of the Maserati born at the turn of the 50s and 70s.
> Pictured above is the 1989 Shamal.
THE LAST BOMB OF THE PRE-FIAT AGE – Here then is the tandem Maserati-Garage Italy, to the sound of strokes of imagination and unconventional intuitions, it will be able to give a future as a collector’s car to the models of the Biturbo family. Machines famous for their breathtaking acceleration, but also for some quality flaws only partially mitigated by their irresistible Latin charm. In some ways, the Maserati Shamal from 1989, it seems made to indulge in a slight facelift and experience a second youth. Powerful, toned and even a little irreverent, together with the contemporary Ghibli it is one of the last sports cars built from the first to the last bolt entirely by Maserati before the company’s transfer to the Fiat group in 1993. Designed by Marcello Gandini (unmistakable the cut of the rear wheel arch, a signature that the Turin master applied for the first time on the Lamborghini Countach in 1971) the Shamal takes its name from a hot, arid and dusty wind that crosses Iran, Iraq and the Arabian peninsula. Some parts of the body, such as the doors and the windshield, derive from the Biturbo Spyder. Under the mighty front hood is ready to let loose a 3.2 biturbo V8 with 320 hp of power built in aluminum. Who knows, now, how many of the 369 Shamal specimens produced, after the summer will come back to Viale Ciro Menotti for a touch-up …
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