Rick's Car

While Rick is not looking for a racing super car, he is interested in getting something very fast with curves that would make anyone's sense of adventure melt at the sight of the car.

So he is looking at the Maserati Gran Turismo S. It is a great car, maybe a little under powered, but that is something he can fix.









One might say that the Coontail brothers were good mechanics. Well, one would be dead wrong. It would be like saying Versailles was a quaint valley cottage. The brothers were more than mechanics; they were nothing less than spot-on fantastic wrench-wielding-ninjas when it came to mucking around with a petrol eating beast of metal. Watching them work on a car wasn’t like watching a lion-tamer work with some gentle overgrown African cat, but that of a knight is silver bright armor taking out a dragons.

So good with a wrench? Yes. Impervious to mechanical troubles? Not so much so.

Rick was building a dream car but he was already into the project three times longer than his original estimate and more money than he cared to think about.

A few months ago, he had come across the antique rusting remains of an old world Maserati GranTurismo S. The car was astonishingly practical for a something that looked like pure porn. It was like discovering a nymphomaniac Page 3 girl that cooked, sewed her own fashion line of clothing, and enjoyed doing freelance accounts. The car had room for four men and a boot large enough for luggage, which was unheard of as all supercars were notorious for having stone hard seats with a ride that pulverize your spine into pudding and a boot smaller than a preschooler’s lunch boxes.

Rick saw potential in this car. He wanted to remake it into something that when other guy saw it, they would think of abandon wife and kids so they could get one. Well maybe not abandoning so much as selling wife and kids for it.

He wanted to put in a new 6.2-liter V8 monster engine to power the car but it wouldn’t fit and he came to his senses and settled for the smaller 4.6-liter V8. However, Rick ever the showman, beef it up with a dual system of screw supercharger/turbo charger combination package. The belt-driven supercharger compressor provided a mammoth kick of torque for the low rpms while the turbocharger jumped into the game to provide added performance at higher rpms. He accomplished this by setting the supercharger to declutch when it reach ideal speeds for the turbocharger which triggered an electronically controlled bypass valve to direct air to the turbocharger, delivering the high-end power without the generally associated "turbo-lag". It was so sexy it would make any self-respecting car enthusiast’s manly parts simply melt with awe.

The original chassis was a problem. It had rusted beyond repair. So Rick remade the whole thing out of aluminum, hoping to reduce the weight. He also spent a fortune getting the body fabricated out of carbon fiber. He overhauled the suspension, decided it wasn’t good enough, threw more money into the car and added a German made high-end electronic suspension system. He also thought it would be best to update the braking power of the now fire breathing monster. He equipped it with racecar quality carbon ceramic brakes to stop his now slightly less heavy, but still knee-weakening-sexy, big fat Italian opera star on 21 inch premium, ultra-performance SP Sport Maxx GT tires.

The results were not unlike any unruly child with a mind of its own. The car was the sexiest, most fabulous, most desirable car Rick had ever made and it was almost drivable; that is if you didn’t mind the psychotic handling and never applied pressure to the gas pedal.

Frustrated, Rick got together with some blokes with lots of pens in their top pockets to fiddle with the car. And the weeks of tweaking commenced.

In the end they modified vehicle's ESP system, transmission behavior, throttle response, and totally change out the differential to put in Ferrari’s most sophisticated differential controls, the E-Diff. Then they added a Manettino (Italian for little lever) control system that tied all the electronic components of the car and allowed for the quick and adjustments of the suspension settings, traction control, differential, and change speed of electronic gearbox. More tweaking happened and then they cracked it!

The Maserati GranTurismo S was pure art. Rick had it custom painted a pearl white. Black leather interior finished it off. It wasn’t dripping of wealthy vulgar like Dave’s Bugatti Veyron, nor was it as fast. But is exuded all the sexy thrill a supercar should.