(car engine roaring) (car engine roaring) (car engine blasting) (upbeat music) - [Henry] This is the new and
very cool Maserati MC20 GT2. It's a serious bit of kit in
the right professional hands, but it's also meant to be approachable and accessible for amateur racers. (car engine roaring) I'm an amateur, so the question is, how close to a professional's
lap time can I get? (gentle classical music) If this film tickles your
trident and warms your slicks, then please think about joining
the Hage
rty Driver's Club. You get things like an
award-winning magazine and 24/7 roadside assistance. But to discover all the joys of joining, just click on the link in
the description down below. (upbeat music) Maserati sports cars
of the past were often nearly cars, in competition terms, frequently living in the shadow of the other local race team. You know, the one down
the road in Maranello. However, that all changed with
the wildly successful MC12, a car developed and raced
to multiple championshi
ps by this man, Ferrari and Maserati test
driver Andrea Bertolini. Andrea, so is it right that you've driven all
the Ferrari F1 cars? - Yeah, yeah, more than 553.
(Henry chuckles) They're now, yeah, all the year. - Wow. That must be an absolute dream come true. - I am really a lucky guy, you know. And yeah, over in the last 20 years, and I miss just the '82 from Gilles. - Yeah.
- But in the next couple of months, we can be sold also. So yeah, yeah.
(Henry laughs) - [Henry] And it's his
lap time
in the MC20 GT2 that I'll be matched against. Just in case you're wondering, my racing experience extends to, well a couple of weekends at Brands Hatch about 16 years ago. I certainly haven't driven
around this circuit before and I've got to talk to camera
and I'm nervous and tall and I think having a birria
for breakfast slows you down. Enough excuses. I've got eight laps
split into two sessions. So let's see how easy this
GT2 is to get to grips with. (car engine revving) Well that's the first
thing. Haven't stalled it coming out of the pit. So clutch is not too bad. First important thing
for a gentleman racer. (car engine stuttering) We've got a sequential gearbox on this, not the double clutch of the road car. Instantly left for braking is, feels like it's gonna be easiest. You could ride for a break,
there's enough room down there. So other thing obviously to a road car, slick tires, big thing, need
to get some heat into those. It's gonna be easier to
get heat into the rears than i
t is the front. (car engine roaring) Okay, brakes. Not the sort of brick wall brake pedal that I might have been
expecting in a race car, but that's actually quite nice for me. This circuit is quite technical, it's certainly in the first bit. How does it ride the curves? Oh wow, yeah. So we've got obviously ABS and
traction control to lean on. (car engine roaring)
We're in our ball. So this is running in its
balance and performance setting. So 621 brake horsepower, 630 horsepower, which is the s
ame as the road car. They say it could run about
another 100 horsepower more than that, but it feels
like plenty around here. (upbeat music) Almost immediately, the
GT2 felt pretty comfortable and reassuring to drive. The steering was smooth,
the paddles were light, and those louvres front
arches made it easy to place in the corners. It was all rather encouraging. Right, let's try and wind it up a bit. (car engine roaring) Nice, clear lights there, easy to see a peripheral
vision, that's importa
nt. We are gonna turn in here,
look through the corner, just be patient but- (car engine roaring) And we'll still need the
heat in those front tires. (car engine roaring) Down this back straight up over here, wheels been over the rise, that's nice. (car engine blasting) But in the blink of a TikTok eye, my first four laps were done. (gentle upbeat music) That's so much fun, (chuckles) which is what it should be, shouldn't it? If you're gonna be a gentleman driver, you're not doing this professio
nally. It should be fun, and this feels fun. That mixture of tons of
power and less downforce, yeah, and it's smooth. If I look slightly dazed, it's probably partly relief
at not having stacked it and partly the bright
fluoro yellow interior. It's part of a cockpit philosophy that Andreas picked up from working with Michael Schumacher 20 years ago, where everything is easy to
find in the heat of a race. It's quite the departure
from the subdued interior of the MC20 street car, but the mechanical
s of
the road going variant, were apparently always designed with a race car in mind. To that extent, the GT2
shares the same carbon tub, and the double wishbone
suspension is similar, although the dampers are now two-way adjustable passive Ohlins. Obviously, the carbon body
work is rather more extreme, and while GT2 rules don't permit as much aeros as the GT3 ones, this will still produce north
of 1,000 kilos of downforce. Perhaps the biggest carryover
from the road car, however, is the heart o
f the
MC20 the Nettuno engine. The GT2 has different turbos
and exhaust manifolds, but it's otherwise pretty much identical, which means it shares the same
clever patented technology. I love it when companies do these cutaways so you can actually have a proper look at the technology inside the engines. For a start, 90-degree V6. Obviously, 120 is ideal for a V6, but in terms of packaging, to be able to get the engine nice and low, not take up too much
room width-wise either, 90 degrees is what t
hey settled on. Not a hot V, turbos on the outside. But the interesting stuff, which you can really see with
here, is what's going on. So we've got the port injection here, and then direct injection down there, and that goes with the two lots of spark plugs that we've got. So we've got one here, but this is the really interesting one because this is the
pre-combustion chamber down here and you just see the
little holes in there. The idea being that it ignites
the fuel that's in here, and then it
's the flames
that go out of there that then ignites really
sort of nicely the rest of the fuel and air mixture in there. It means you can get really high power when you're using this and also high revs, but then also have really good efficiency when you switch to the
other spark plug down here. The problem with this, because
this has been patented, is thermal management. It's keeping all that heat under control, and the key to that is in this piece here. So this is what that
cutaway is in reali
ty. So this is the pre-combustion chamber. You can see the little
holes just around there 'cause it's a passive
system, not an active one. And this is a special copper alloy to deal with all that heat. The end result is a very characterful and extremely strong engine
with 540 pounds feet of torque, yet it's a race engine that's also surprisingly happy
at slow speeds and low revs. Not that slow and low are what I need for my final go at a lap time. (gentle music) Love to not be talking to you at
the same time, really, but- (car engine revving) Try feeling it in. (car engine stuttering) Bit of oversteer, but actually,
it's pretty easy to catch. (car engine roaring) Nice, we're out of there, come on. Pick this braking point. Go on ahead, Henry, be smooth. Gotta not be too timid at
the back of the throttle. (car engine revving) But you gotta get it hooked up. I use those long straights because I think that's where
it's gonna make its lap time because it's got all that power. (car engine ro
aring) (car engine blasting) Oh wow, what a car. It's amazing how quickly, given this is the first
time I've driven this car and this track, how quickly you can
get used to pushing it. (gentle classical music) And what did the stopwatch
say after all that? Is this a car that's easy
to get to grips with? Well, my best lap was
three-second shy of Andrea's. I'm not gonna pretend that's amazing, but it's within the 107% rule, so sort of acceptable, I think. But what feedback would Andrea have? - You
've never been here.
(Henry laughs) You never drove the car. So I told you straight
away was we are really in the good window, you know, in the working range.
- Yeah. - And from this point, if we can organize a test day, a proper test day to spend
a lot of time in the car, in the circuit where we
have to race with the GT2, I hope that we can race
together as a teammate. (Henry laughs) - I would like that. - We can try to organize.
- Yeah. - If you look all the line and the way that you drive
the
car, you are there. Now we have to start
to work on the details. The details, it mean
where we have to brake, how many pressure, you
know, on the braking. If you see, always my peak is higher, and then I go off power, I off brake. Always, you see? But
your one is good as well. But we can have, you
can put more pressure. - Yeah.
- But this delta pressure is just-
- It's the trusting. - Bravo, the trusting
of the car that I drove for 1,000 kilometer, and then you did the
(chuckles) 50 kilometer.
(gentle anticipatory music) - [Henry] Looking at the graphs, I could instantly see
areas for improvement, but the GT2 does have a passenger seat. So I asked Andrea if he'd perhaps bring the data to life a little. Okay, so now we're gonna go for it. (car engine roaring) So still patient. Thanks Walker, we'll get to there straight and set up pull. Oh the straight. Oh yeah, where's he gonna brake? Wow, he's braking nearly at
the 100-meter board there. Braking all the way up to the effects. Oh he en
d there. Much more aggressive than that. Straight, bit of over steer. Now here. (car engine roaring) Winds it up. Wow that must be 75 meters. So he is a good 25 meters later there, on the brakes, all the
way out to the exit. Yeah and the short shift down to there. Runs a little wider, actually, I was hugging the curve
more on the inside. We're getting a bigger squirt
between the corners there. Earlier down shifts, really using that entry braking more than I was. It's fascinating to see
what I wa
s, that's at 56. That's a good couple of seconds
he's found over what I saw. (gentle music)
(car engine roaring) I was now desperate to have
another few laps myself with a bit more tire temp and a bit more bravery
in the braking points. Maybe I could, but maybe not. Perhaps it was best to
get out of the race suit and leave this 360,000
pound, plus taxes, machine in one piece. Not completely disgraced then. And undoubtedly a large part
of that is down to the car and actually how easy it is to dri
ve. What's the future for this car then? Well obviously it's gonna compete in that Fanatech GT2 championship, where I suspect it should do pretty well given that it had a pole position and the second place on the podium, first time out at the end of last year. But it should also be, well seen perhaps in some
24 hour races as well, outside of that championship, which I think is pretty nice. And who knows, one day, maybe even we will see Maserati MC20's at Le Mans doing what the MC12 never did. An
d maybe even more excitingly, this race car might
inspire something else. There's nothing official, but I wouldn't be
surprised if at some point, we saw an MC20 GT2 road car and that's a very tantalizing prospect. (car engine blasting) (text drumming)
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