You Forgot About The Beautiful Maserati Barchetta Again, Didn’t You?

Photography by Nat Twiss

At the recent Silverstone Classic, our photographer Nat Twiss sent me a note about having taken some photos of a Maserati he’d planned to write about, only to realize I’d written a longer piece about the Barchetta a few months ago. “Scratch that,” he said but I disagreed: the internet is very short on photos of this car.

In 1991, a much different Maserati offered this car to customers who loved track days. It was every bit as advanced in construction as many of its contemporaries: a removable three-piece body in aluminum honeycomb, fibreglass, and carbon fibre; weight was 1,708 lbs (775 kg), and its modern-day power-to-weight equivalent would be a Porsche 911 GT2. That’s what the spec sheet dictated, at least: the two most notable aspects of the car is how Maserati successfully predicted the track day market and how it, embarrassingly, made just 17 of them.

Analogous to how peering inside an early Ferrari somehow feels connected to a newer model, the shots of the example at the Silverstone Classic look, to me at least, like the grandfather of our current crop of track day machines.

Would you add a Barchetta to your garage…assuming you could find one?