Each morning it is the same sun that awakes us, but so too do we welcome each day as a new experience. And though it is not as if the Maserati MC12 has ever left us since it debuted in 2004, so too may we celebrate it again today as if its existence was just as fresh and full of possibility.
I say this not because the Maserati MC12 crept into my dreams (though it is welcome to), or that one drove past me while I was walking to get groceries (though I wish one would), or that I was kidnapped in one as part of an elaborate plan to oust the prime minister of the United Kingdom (again, I am more than open to this happening at any time).
It is that the car’s designer, Frank Stephenson, blessed us with the ability to see the MC12 come to life in a sketch, be born again, ushered into this world, received the breath, the holy breath, in this case, some ink on some paper.
Stephenson does not give us any juicy details about internal politics of draping the skin of the MC12 over the skeleton of the Ferrari Enzo. The best we get is that he wished he could have done bigger side windows, but the construction of the Enzo limited him to littler ones.
Nor do we get any dreamy or gauzy descriptions of the magnificent, loony strakes that run over the extractors, like a Ferrari F50 that was cursed by a wizard and turned into a Venetian mask. There is a long tail because it’s good for aerodynamics. There is a big wing because it’s good for aerodynamics. The engine is in the middle so it gets very hot. The MC12, a car about as flamboyant as cars got at the time, was designed in about as matter-of-fact a fashion as you could imagine.
That is fine with me because the MC12 is not a car that has to make sense or be good, or pretty, or anything really. It is a rumble from an earthquake, that there are deep forces always bubbling under the normal din of the auto industry, and that a car like the MC12 could spit up at any time.