Like a GT2-meets-GT3 race car but with more power, the MCXtrema is a track toy like no other
Undesirable when getting to know a highly extroverted car: an audience.
Only moments ago, our pit garage at Anglesey Circuit was vacant apart from a new Maserati dripping with carbon and malevolence, plus associated stacks of warmer-coddled slicks and trolley-mounted air-jack canisters.
But that was before Elliot, who attends to this car’s specific needs, fired life into its straight-piped twin-turbo V6.
A spectacular, curiously Nascar-style idle quickly drew a crowd around the so-called Beast of Modena (so-called by the pom-pom-waving Maserati press department, admittedly). And because the V6 sips half a gallon of criminally expensive 102-octane warming through, there has been ample time for that crowd to swell.
This level of attention is completely understandable. Just 62 slant-nosed MCXtremas will exist and only a small fraction of those will ever chomp through the brake pads with which they left the Viale Ciro Menotti plant. Such is the life of a ‘collectible’.
This car, however, belongs to Mike Hilton, and as well as being the only example sold to the UK, it is also the most thrashed MCXtrema globally. Maserati is taking a deep interest in how it fares, though Elliot says maintenance hasn’t been troubling and reliability is good.
Which isn’t to say cheap. Tyres are three grand a pop and on high-speed circuits fuel consumption is three litres a minute. And try not to ding it. The body is full carbonfibre.
Peer inside the wheel wells and you’ll see quick-release latches for the vast clamshells. You can’t exactly repair it piecemeal.
Eventually, the car is ready to be driven, and once I’ve wormed my way into the caged badger set that passes for the cockpit, there must be 25 onlookers, one of whom I notice is Chris Harris, formerly of this parish.
This is Yehudi Menuhin walking in when you’ve just about got a handle on Frère Jacques.
I’ve no idea what the clutch feels like but suspect it’s vindictive. Even after avoiding a humiliating stall, race cars can be fractious at low revs and on part-throttle, and the idea of kangaroo-petrolling my way along the pit is just appalling.
The stresses of the job. You do your homework on these rare-groove machines, and at least on paper the MCXtrema is not wholly unfamiliar.
It serves as the whimsical apotheosis of an order that starts with the road-going MC20 supercar and shares that car’s carbon monocoque and fundamental bits of its 3.0-litre Nettuno engine. Admittedly, it gets funkier from there.
Maserati also makes a GT2-class racing version of the MC20 and the MCXtrema is essentially a crossbreed of that car and a full-on GT3 racer, the likes of which you see at Le Mans.
Except it has rather a lot more power than any GT3 car and a lot more contact patch. The front tyres are the same width as those Ferrari fits to the back axle of the 296 GTB road car.
The stark consequences of that fact will become evident when, even before its slicks are on song, the MCXtrema rips around tiny Anglesey five seconds quicker than a 911 GT3.
When it’s time to go, to my relief the clutch is linear and firm, and the engine incredibly polite. I’m out of the pits smoothly and into the Welsh sunshine. Three things stand out straight away.
The first is the noise, which is industrial and serrated and speaks to the total lack of sound deadening. Maserati is pretty lax about the accuracy of claimed kerb weights when it comes to the road cars but you sense the finned MCXtrema’s official mass of 1300kg dry (only 50kg more than a comparable mid-engined GT3 car) probably isn’t far from the truth.
The glasshouse is polycarbonate and no attempt has been made to lessen the starkness of the cage that hovers millimetres above my head.
It’s all enjoyably racy-miles more raw than the usual track-day supercars – and owners who drive their MCXtrema will adore the parallel sensory universe into which it instantly propels you.
The second and third observations are the extraordinary response of the steering and engine. The steering is electrically assisted and has several maps, with pro drivers tending to opt for the lightest to eke out as much communication as possible.
From the first millimetre of input, the car pivots. And it’s not just that the rack is geared like a speeding bullet, with body and back axle floundering in its wake: generally the rest of the car goes with it. It’s a strain of alacrity totally outside the showroom- supercar idiom, which is exactly the intention.
It’s the same story with the race-bred 3.0-litre motor, which isn’t half as cammy as I’d expected and runs on a Bosch motorsport ECU. It, too, has several maps, but in any of them the response is awesomely sharp, in a way that defies the fact that this engine is neither naturally aspirated nor aided by the torque fill of an electric motor.
Note that for this version of the Nettuno, Maserati swapped the MC20’s IHI turbos for a pair of larger Garrett units. If they could get this sort of exactness into the road car, it would be bedlam.
Downstream sits not a dual-clutch gearbox but a six-speed sequential whose pneumatic action is driven by an unsettlingly loud pump mounted just behind the driver’s head.
Its incessant honking is a hallmark of the MCXtrema experience. The shifts themselves are no quicker than what you get in the very best road-going supercars, but the lightness and toughness of the hardware is what matters more here.
You feel every shift indelibly, as though you’re hand- feeding the mechanical limited-slip diff through which monstrous levels of torque flow to the car’s 18in forged-aluminium wheels.
It’s an engaging powertrain, for sure. And the sound? Hard to define. Think De Tomaso Pantera minus the laziness, then ripping calico as you close in on 7500rpm. Inside, you’re also treated to the whine of straight-cut gears. And the honking. Always the honking.
How does it all feel? I’ll let you in on a secret: race car interiors give me the heebie-jeebies. Even the haute-design interiors like this one, with lots of deliberately artful carbonfibre and Alcantara.
Being a bit claustrophobic, the intense tightness of the MCXtrema’s cockpit and the way you need to ferret behind the roll-cage and pull the door-release tab at precisely the right angle just to get out… it isn’t my cup of tea.
However, once out on track, the discomfort instantly evaporates. You no longer have the headspace for it. Caterhams pop into view before disappearing behind me as rapidly as though we were headed in opposite directions. The Maserati is exciting and meatily responsive and an assault on the senses. Trail-braking is true banzai stuff too.
Mind you, until the tyres are on the boil, you have an odd relationship with the front. So fat are those tyres that the car can brake and turn outrageously late with flattering stability at the back. The car dives in out of nowhere, like a peregrine falcon, to pierce each apex.
But it then comes as a surprise that the nose will push wide when the balance shifts on the exit. Stay on the power and that evolves into a spike of oversteer. The solution is to be even more aggressive on the brakes, rotating the car more committedly. That the MCXtrema is benign enough to tolerate being experimented on is, again, the point.
In a second session just before lunch, the tyres come properly into their ideal operating window and at this point the MCXtrema is balanced and superbly easy to manhandle as you wind back the vigilance of the motorsport traction control.
It feels largely free of vices, although-and I suppose this is a race car thing – it never quite seems to hit a true flow state.
It is a binary driving experience and this leads you to the inevitable question of whether you might well be having more fun in a properly sorted, milder-mannered track-day car like, say, a little Lotus Exige.
You probably would, but that’s a bit reductionist. There is space in this world for both Exige and MCXtrema, and indeed also the three- year-old 911 Carrera Cup race car for £230,000 or so that is the most pertinent reason not to spend a million pounds on the Maserati.
If you still plumped for the MCXtrema, it would be because it is an engrossing safari into GT3 land, somehow deadly serious but also not. There will never be anything else quite like it.
MASERATI MCXTREMA
Price
£936,000
Engine
V6, 2992cc, twin-turbocharged, petrol
Power
724bhp at 7500rpm
Torque
538lb ft at 3000rpm
Gearbox
6-spd sequential, RWD
Dry weight
1300kg (approx)
0-62mph
2.9sec (est)
Top speed
200mph (est)
Economy
4 litres per minute
Rivals
Dallara EXP, McLaren 720S GT3X, Porsche 935
The inspiration: MC12 GT1
A GT3-style track-day toy is an unusual car for Maserati to make, but given the company has the iconic MC12 GT1 in its back catalogue, and a modern carbon monocoque around which it could build a tribute to that car, you can see why it was tempted.
The 580bhp, 1250kg MC12 GTI was built from 2004 essentially as a racing Ferrari Enzo with close to Formula 1 levels of engineering integrity. It used the Enzo’s tub and the bones of its 6.0-litre V12, and Michael Schumacher was involved in the development, advising Andrea Bertolini, who is still Maserati’s chief development driver.
The MC12 was often dominant in the FIA GT Championship, going up against competition versions of the Ferrari 550 Maranello, Aston Martin DB9 and C6-generation Chevrolet Corvette.
This despite the fact that it was heavily penalised by incipient Balance of Performance regulations (introduced on account of the wild Maserati) and was complex for drivers to extract the best from. Even start-up required works personnel with computers.
These days an MC12 GTI costs millions and the operating procedures make the MCXtrema seen like a Golf GTI by comparison. Which, you have to say, is a big tick in the box for the less expensive and faster youngster.
