Maserati Indy

Maserati wanted a four-seat car that did not look like a saloon, and Vignale's answer was to run the roof all the way to the tail. Virginio Vairo drew it: a fastback with a high roofline over the back seats, a great deal of glass, and a single flat pane forming the tailgate above the luggage area. It is one of the few genuine hatchbacks of the 1960s Italian GT era, and it is the reason the car works as well as it does. Vignale had already built the 3500 GT Spyder, the Sebring and the Mexico for Maserati, and the Indy belongs to that line rather than the Ghia and Italdesign line that produced the Ghibli and the Bora. It is the more restrained house. The nose is low and wide with retractable headlights, the bumpers wrap, and there is very little decoration anywhere on the car. The earliest interiors are the interesting ones, with two hexagonal instrument binnacles facing the driver. Maserati replaced them in 1970 with a flat leather fascia, which reads as better resolved and much less memorable.

The Indy carries its motorsport record in its name and nowhere else, which is the honest way to put it. Maserati won the Indianapolis 500 in 1939 and 1940, both times with Wilbur Shaw driving chassis 3032, a supercharged straight-eight 8CTF entered by Mike Boyle's team as the Boyle Special. No European car had won at the Speedway since 1919, and Shaw became the first driver to take the race in consecutive years. That is a genuine achievement, and it belongs to a car built three decades before this one. By 1969 Maserati had not fielded a works team since 1957 and was owned by Citroën, which had no interest in racing an expensive four-seat coupe. There was no series the Indy fitted anyway: too heavy for GT racing, too slow for prototypes, and built in numbers that made homologation beside the point. So the badge does the work. A company that had won at Indianapolis put the name on a road car thirty years later, and the road car was never campaigned by the factory in anything. Both halves of that are worth saying plainly.

The Indy is the Maserati that got left out of the story, and the reason is arithmetic. It sold well by Maserati's standards, which meant nobody treated it as special. There is no film car, no poster and no famous owner attached to this model in the way there is to the Ghibli. Search for it and most of what comes back is classified advertising. Where it does live is in the Indianapolis connection, which has kept the name in circulation long after the car itself dropped out of it. Every retelling of Wilbur Shaw's back-to-back wins mentions that Maserati later named a road car after them, and the Boyle Special survives in the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum, which means the story is on permanent public display in a way the Indy never was. Beyond that it is a car with a small, quiet, well-informed following, mostly inside the Maserati clubs. That is not a cultural footprint. It is closer to the opposite, and it is one of the reasons a good one still costs what it does.

An Indy asks less of an owner than most cars of its era and more of a body shop. The unitary shell decides everything: rust in the sills, floors, screen surrounds and suspension mounting areas is common on cars that have lived anywhere damp, and putting it right properly means a bare-shell job, because there is no chassis to fall back on. Mechanically it is more forgiving than its reputation suggests. The alloy Tipo 107 V8 is a long-lived engine, but it seeps oil from alloy joints as gaskets age and it does not enjoy standing. A car that has sat for years wants a compression check before it is fired up, because stuck rings on a Maserati V8 can break on start-up and take the bore with them. Clutches wear, gearbox whine is normal, and electrical faults are almost always corroded earths rather than a failing loom. On 4900 cars the Citroën brake accumulator needs recharging on a decade cycle and the system needs green LHM. Interior trim and the Vignale-specific brightwork are the parts that take months to find.