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| Beautifully built and finished |
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So, what about the engine, the heart of the car? This four-cam, 32-valve Maserati V8 has always been a fabulous unit, right down to its crackle-red cam covers, and is based on the same cylinder block as Ferrari uses in the F430. It has variable timing for the inlet cams, but still the torque peaks at a high speed.
Which means you have to rev it hard to get it to fly. It's surprising how often you press the short-travel accelerator pedal to the floor, but when the reward is the hard-edged, throbbily-undertoned howl of a free-breathing V8 as it approaches max revs, then you really don't mind. The Sport GT will amble along at low revs in high gears quite happily, but it's always tempting to flick the downshift paddle a couple of times and let rip. Do that to the maximum possible extent and you'll hit 62mph in 5.2 seconds from standstill and hurtle onwards to 171mph. Average fuel consumption is claimed to be 17.9mpg; not great, but it could have been worse.
To drive, then, the Sport GT is unexpectedly fine: the Quattroporte in its true colours, as it was meant to be. It's also beautifully built and finished, with everything in our test car working as it should. The sat-nav graphics are a bit my-first-computer and reverse can be slow to engage, but that's the limit of the snags.
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| More exclusive than an M5 |
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So, better than an M5, a Mercedes E55 AMG or an Audi RS6? More expensive, clearly, but also more bespoke, more exclusive and oozing non-Teutonic personality.
You look at this car, you drive it, you want it. There's a Deadly Sin in there somewhere.
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