Jeremy Clarkson review: Maserati MC20 Cielo

With the MC20 Cielo, Maserati has made something unique. Supercars are quite often annoying, but this one I like.

It’s a beauty: the Maserati MC20 Cielo

One of the glorious things about becoming old is that you no longer have to do things just to appease people in your social circle. When you’re young, you have to fit in if you want to keep on fitting in, but when you’re old, you don’t. You can do pretty much what you want.

When she was in her mid-sixties my grandmother used to spend her days in dress shops, sitting outside the changing rooms and roaring with laughter when people came out in a new frock. “That’s awful,” she’d shriek. Don’t you wish you could be like that sometimes?

Well, I’m close. I decided ages ago that I didn’t like skiing, so after many years of going to the Alps, because that was the done thing, I just stopped. Friends were incredulous that I no longer wanted to stand around at Geneva airport waiting for my skis to emerge and then spend the next seven days making my thighs hurt. But I rode the storm of indignation and now in February I go to the Tropics and sit on a beach, which is better.

More recently I’ve stopped wearing socks. Why should I? Like hats and sunglasses, they make me claustrophobic. I no longer go to standing-up parties because they make my back hurt, I no longer pretend to be interested in wine because I’m just not, and if a grown man asks for a selfie I tell him quite happily to eff off.

I’m now starting to question my love affair with shooting. There’s often a lot of walking and, as a hobby, it’s pretty hard to defend when you’re in the company of ­vegans. Not that I am any more. I can’t be bothered with them. It’s the same with socialists. I’ve been listening to them droning on for 60 years and they still make no sense, so now, if a lefty pipes up, I just put my fingers in my ears and say “lalalalala” until it shuts up.

There’s been a change in how I view cars as well. When I was doing Top Gear it seemed necessary to practise what I preached and actually own the cars I raved about. So I had a Ferrari 355 and a Ford GT and a Lamborghini ­Gallardo. But looking back, these mid-engined supercars were ­mostly annoying. You couldn’t see what was coming at junctions, they had boots the size of shoeboxes, they made horrible graunching noises every time the gradient changed slightly, and they were hard to get in and out of.

Today, though, it’s not the practical issues that put me off so much as the sense that supercar makers, with the possible exception of Lamborghini, are far too serious. They want to extract as much power and grip and speed as is technically possible and you do have to ask yourself why.

Because good though he may be at punching people in the face, the boxer and supercar fan Tyson Fury is not able to take the Eau Rouge corner at the Spa-Francorchamps racetrack in Belgium flat-out. Even if the car he’s driving is. And someone with a successful chain of carpet shops in West Yorkshire is never going to notice that the invisible elephant sitting on his engine cover enables him to take the roundabout outside Otley at 110km/h. These cars, then, are being built to sate the appetite of a market that simply doesn’t exist. Far better, surely, to make a car that’s low and swoopy and wonderful to behold, but which masks all the problems that the design is bound to create. Don’t try to make the car as fast as possible – try to make it usable.

Which brings me to the ­Maserati Cielo, a convertible version of the MC20 – a car I reviewed on these pages last year. And liked.

I didn’t know it was a convertible when it arrived. Such is my lack of interest in supercars these days, I walked past it for five days in my drive wondering why Maserati had delivered another MC20.

On the sixth day, though, I thought I’d take it out, so I climbed in and discovered the back window was down. Knowing from ­experience that nothing is where you expect it to be, I looked everywhere for the switch that would close it: in the glovebox, under the dog’s bed, in a castle on Sardinia and, finally, on the touchscreen. Hidden away in a sub-menu, there it was, along with another illuminated button that did what? To find out I pushed it and, whoa, the glass roof folded away.

Inside the Maserati MC20 Cielo

I then found another button that turned the glass opaque and that made me happy. It suggested that instead of fiddling about with camber and turbo efficiency for optimum track use, they’d thought, “Sod that. Let’s make the glass in the roof un-see-through”. Good idea. Not everyone who has sex in a car is a dogger.

With no roof the Cielo is easy to get in and out of, and you can see what’s coming at (most) junctions. And there’s an actual button that causes the nose of the car to rise so there are no graunching noises when the gradient changes.

There’s more. The noise is muted, the ride is smooth and there are no histrionics at all. The interior, for example, is almost wilfully plain. You could go shopping in a Cielo. ­Although if you buy anything ­bigger than an earwig you’ll need to have it delivered because it won’t fit in the boot.

So, what about the speed? Well, it has some of course. But it’s not scary speed. My social media these days is rammed with young men in Ferraris and Porsches and McLarens putting their foot down hard in second gear and then crashing ­immediately into a tree.

In the Cielo, which weighs only a smidgen over 1.5 tonnes, there’s a twin-turbo V6 that develops 470kW, so it’ll canter happily to just on the polite side of 320km/h. But it’s usable power somehow. Happy power. More like a wind turbine than a volcano. This makes it not only practical and comfortable but fun as well.

Of course, you may be wondering why Ferrari allowed its sister company to make such an obvious rival. But these days they are not sister companies. Ferrari is on its own and Maserati is a part of the giant that owns Vauxhall and Jeep and Peugeot and Fiat and Citroën.

The giant’s done a good job here. It has made a supercar that I like. And what I like most of all is that when you’re going out at night you can say to your wife or ­husband, “Shall we take the ­Maserati?” That has a ring.

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MASERATI MC20 CIELO

ENGINE: 3.0-litre V6 twin-turbo (470kW/729Nm)

PRICE: From $528,000

JEREMY’S RATING: Four out of five stars