PAR CORSE

Is the Maserati MC20 an engineering marvel, a work of art, a speed junkie's dream machine or an ostentatious midlife crisis monolith of excess? It's all of the above - and more

- SUFFIAN HAKIM

THE HUMAN MIND is sometimes ill-equipped to fully comprehend the awesome, because the awesome can be awe-inspiring, or it can be awful. Most times, it’s both in equal amounts, and it’s this duality, this coming together of the excellent and the appalling, the sacred and the profane, the transcendental and the mundane, that keeps us transfixed yet unable to explain.

There are a few things in the world that are rapturous and arduous at the same time, but Italy seems to hold a particularly high concentration of them. It’s Leonardo da Vinci’s masteries and mysteries; it’s Arrigo Sacchi’s AC Milan side of the late ’80s and early ’90s; it’s the leaning tower of Pisa; it’s Calabria for its pulchritude and poverty; it’s Rome for its Vicario and vices. It’s the Maserati MC20.

Am I going to get all existential in a car review? Yes, because the Maserati MC20 is no ordinary car, and to write about its place in our collective consciousness is to attempt to unify in writing its excesses and its transcendental nuances. And that in itself is difficult, because for something to be transcendent, it also needs to leave the things we find familiar or comforting.

Friends of Augustman at Maserati invited me to test-drive the MC20 a few weeks before the time of writing, leaving a milliondollar engineering marvel in my hands for half a day. I thought it was nerve-wracking the first time I held a rifle during National Service, but this was a million times more.