NEVER MIND THE BITURBOS
By John Price Williams
All images courtesy of Maserati
 In the tiny kitchen of a cottage in the New Forest is one of the rarest pieces of Maserati automobilia it is possible to set eyes on. Propped up on a shelf is a cam cover from a
prototype six-valve per cylinder quad-cam V6 engine, which was never put into production. The concept of trying to cram all 36 valves into a 2-litre capacity engine came from Maserati's swashbuckling chairman, Alejandro De Tomaso, because it is said that he wanted to go one better than Audi (who at the time had just developed a five valve per cylinder engine). However, the huge complexity and cost quickly put an end the plan.
It's a reminder to Anthony Cazalet, whose cottage it is, of his days as technical director of Maserati (UK) Ltd., the firm set up to import right-hand drive Biturbos and a few Quattroportes to Britain, and of his many trips to Modena.
Anthony is the son of Peter Cazalet, who trained the Queen Mother's horses, and is always described by his friends as `larger than life'-which indeed he is - a big man with a fund of stories, a very loud laugh and an appetite for the good things in life, like the excellent steak he cooked us for lunch as he recounted the saga of Maserati in the eighties and the Biturbo's foray into the UK.
But first some background. The import of Maseratis into the UK from the sixties to the eighties is a tangled tale. In the sixties, there was the Chipstead Group, controlled by Italian entrepreneur Mario Tozzi-Condivi and the Marks and Spencer heir Jonathan Sieff.
In the late seventies, Condivi, a good friend of Maserati's engineering director Aurelio Bertocchi, started his own operation selling Italian cars in London with a company called MTC - named after his initials. As he was also importing De Tomaso's own cars like the Mangusta and the Pantera and Longchamps he also got to know De Tomaso himself.
 When MTC ran into difficulties in 1980, Modena Concessionaires in West Bromwich took over as the Maserati importer. This
company was part of International Motors, run by Robert Edmiston, now a multi-millionaire from his Subaru and other franchises.
But Edmiston had a serious falling out with De Tomaso, who would not make right-hand drive Biturbos for the UK market, thus giving Modena Concessionaires nothing much to sell, as the pre-Biturbo cars were now out of production.
Enter Maserati (UK) Ltd. When the Biturbo officially reached Britain in 1986, it was marketed by this new company under the chairmanship of the ubiquitous Mario Tozzi-Condivi, who appointed Anthony Cazalet as the UK Company's technical director, in charge of homologation - that is making sure that the cars met UK standards.
Anthony's tale.
 "When Edmiston gave up the franchise the person Maserati started talking to was Mario, because they knew him and he was in London and he was planning to become the UK importer when they finally built right-hand drive... I couldn't believe my luck being in the right place at the right time as the UK rights were being negotiated.
Before this, in the early 80s I went across the Sahara with the author Quentin Crewe, who later wrote a book about the trip, and when we got back in 1982 I needed a job badly. I'd been fiddling around with cars and I was pretty short
of cash, so I started selling Alfa Romeos in Chelsea for Taylor and Crawley.
Mario, who also worked there, became a great friend of mine and he was a brilliant car sales man. Somebody would come in with a clubfoot and no left arm and he'd sell them a manual with no power-assisted steering. And if they said `I want an automatic with power-assisted steering' they would walk out having bought an Alfetta, which had heavy steering and a ghastly manual gear change.
This was 1982 and sales of Alfa Romeo were in freefall. These cars rusted even then. `Oh no sir, they've got a five-year rust warranty' - bollocks. They shoved an anti-rust squirt up the thing, but it was a complete waste of time - Alfettas still rusted before your very eyes.
At one stage I supplied an Alfetta to a man that was older than the car he put in part exchange. It had been sitting in some field somewhere for three or four years; they brought them in, sprayed them up, cleaned them up and passed them out.
Let's start talking about the Biturbo. De Tomaso borrowed a lot of money off the Italian government, and he had the Innocenti factory in Milan.
 He decided to take Maserati down market, as it were, and developed the Biturbo. Now they announced it would be sold at about £8,000 and they took thousands of deposits at £1,000 a time, so he had quite a few million pounds sitting in the bank.
But all that he had was one car, a prototype, sitting there. He didn't have anything else. So he then went to the government and said `either I give them their deposits back or we put this car into production. I need £X million'.
And, of course, being de Tomaso everybody went ahhhh.... and gave him the money and so he had a lot of money then to put the thing into production which they did very, very quickly. De Tomaso couldn't help himself making a cock-up. He wanted to have a four-cylinder engine. And everybody said to him `no you can't have a twin turbo four-cylinder engine because nobody will buy it - Maseratis have to have at least six cylinders.'
So he took the Merak engine and made it simple. The designs are much the same in terms of things like symmetrical (cylinder) heads, although single cam on the Biturbo. On the eve of launch of the first car, the engineer from IHI in Japan, who make the turbochargers, says they've got a problem with the wastegate valve. The valve panel was coming off because it had been fixed on by rivets instead of being welded. So the engineer says: `we now take every turbo charger, put them on a 747, take them back to Japan, we will do them all and bring them back.' So they sent all these things back to Japan and they were fixed and sent back. Everything was always crisis management.
 De Tomaso then announced that he was going to produce left-hand drive only in Italy for two years and that his production was 6,000 a year, which is quite a lot. He had thousands of orders but by the time the car came along it was about £12,000, not £8,000, and he said people had to pay the extra money.
It was still a very good value for a fast car, and as a 2-litre coming in under the Italian tax break, it was brilliant. So De Tomaso produces the cars in Italy for two years initially and the reason he does it is simple - he lets the Italian public do the development.
When I say it was riddled with faults, I understate the meaning of the word riddled.
They had huge problems with the car. The first was that if you drove the car into a fuel station and turned the engine off you couldn't restart it because of the heat sink. It was just evaporating fuel and you had to wait till it was cool. We had serious problems later in the UK, but not as bad as these early problems because we had a fuel return to the tank by that time. Secondly, if you parked your car in the garage, running beautifully, the next morning you had to have new valves because the belt tensioner was not up to scratch and the cam belt would jump the next time you started it. There were three developments on that.
People were getting pissed off with the cars because they were so unreliable.
De Tomaso then sold them in America but he shot himself in the foot by not allowing them to have automatics at first - when he did supply automatics they were terrible three-speed boxes because he couldn't afford to spend any more money. At 20 mph the car was doing 1,000 revs, so at 50mph you were doing 2,500rpm. The Biturbos sold very, very well in the US but he was now going to have to expand to find other markets like Germany and Switzerland and eventually the UK.
In about 1985-86, Officine Alfieri Maserati SpA, as they called themselves then, set up Maserati Right Hand Drive Ltd. in Jersey. Mario Condivi set it up on the orders of the factory - and it was De Tomaso's attempt to try and make more money. What happened was that Right Hand Drive paid say ten-grand for a car, then sold it to us at Maserati UK Ltd for eleven grand.
On March 1, 1986 Maserati UK Ltd came into official existence. It had existed before that because I'd been a director, Mario and I were the directors, but it didn't have anywhere to go, it didn't have anything, it had no prospects, it had nothing.
The Great Fire of Stevenage.
We had been sent over two cars for homologation purposes, a coupe and a 425 - they were both painted in the most hideous battleship grey, one of De Tomaso's favourite colours.
We had to do four tests to get the cars passed by the Department of Transport for use in the UK - most of the general tests had been done already for Italy, but these were extra.
One of them was windscreen defrost/demist. Now the regulations were that you had to put the car in a cold room at minus 20 degrees then spray the windscreen with water, and see how effectively the screen could be cleared of ice. You had to have cleared 80`Ic of the windscreen after a certain length of time. We took the 425 to Stevenage where British Aerospace had a cold room - it was minus 20 inside though outside it was a warm day. The man from the ministry arrived and put on a coat to go in the car with Frank Wykes from MIRA, who sprayed the windscreen.
They started the car, which was a miracle as it was never a good starter at the best of times, and kept revving it. After about 20 minutes, we were looking through the window into the cold room and I saw smoke coming out of the bloody thing - they were still inside the car. I pointed and waved and they pulled the lever to open the bonnet - it was still going flat out - then it all caught fire, so I ran, out grabbed a fire extinguisher and put this thing out.
Somebody pressed the alarm bells and all the fire people came and it was all a great song and dance. What had happened was that the power-assisted steering pump had blown oil all over the turbocharger, which as you can imagine, was red hot. There was a big conference and the two guys inside the car announced that they had taken a piece of paper and drawn around the defrosted bit, as they had to do for the test, just as I was putting the fire out. So we had passed the test, even though the thing had gone up in smoke!
These two grey cars were taken apart for homologation. They were, however, sold later, which was absolutely appalling. I saw one of then about 10 years ago and it was just completely useless.
We had to go for the full vehicle inspection, which happened in September 1986, so we must have got full vehicle homologation in about November and we had softened up the dealers - there were about 20 at launch. We had no headquarters. There was this grey edifice in High St, Kensington, where we hired offices by the day. We didn't have a proper base because bluntly we didn't really have the money if the truth be known, so we would just hire the offices and use them on an ad hoc basis.
The big problem we had was that in 1986 in March the lira was 3,000 to the pound and by the time we finally got the cars, which was towards the end of the year, the lira had gone down to 2,000. For every hundred lira that it went down we had to increase the price of the car in England by £1,000. In March 1986, we thought we'd be able to sell the coupe for £17,500 - the reality in 1987 was £25,000.
Biturbos land in Britain.
The first UK cars were due to be landed in early January of 1987. It had snowed very badly. The cars were to come into Sheerness, where we had a preparation centre, but the weather was frightful, and the ship went into Dover and the cars were sorted out by another firm because we were desperate to get them in, prepped and out. There were three lorry loads of them. Then the rest started trickling in to Sheerness, where we had a trained mechanic who did all the PDI stuff.
The engine tended to leak oil on the driver's side, between the head and the cam carrier and you had smoke signals coming out. It was not on every one, just on most of them. And we had to set the carburettor by adjusting the height of the float and just generally check the cars out. When the cars left they'd done a road test. If you caned a carburetted car it would do 14, 15 to the gallon. But they were a fast car; 0-60mph in seven seconds. The handling was a bit sudden to put it mildly, though they had a very smooth ride. They were very comfortable.
The first 425s had these ridiculous Missoni interiors that we couldn't give away... very blue, or this burnt orange. You opened the door and went aargh...beautiful material though and it would never wear out.
Just before Easter 1987 we had the Maserati launch at James Young in Berkeley Square, London. We borrowed Bobby Bell's 250F and Fangio was there, so was Stirling Moss. James Young sold a lot of cars for us, they did a very good job and we set up a service arrangement for them at the Chagford St garage.
But Maserati (UK) Ltd was a complete shoestring operation and our credit got cut off. We only managed to get ourselves out of the crap in September 1987 by selling the business to a consortium of northern businessmen, who set up near Elland Road football ground in Leeds.
By this time we were getting the 2.8s. In 1987 we sold 99 carburettor cars and then fuel injection started coming in early to middle '88 and they were much better. I mean the whole quality of the cars was far, far superior.
Maserati had gone through the car from front to back. They stopped oil leaking on to the exhaust manifolds with the fuel injection, the automatic gear box was a four-speed, there was an improved air conditioning system, the front suspension and rear suspension were changed, there were five bolts holding the wheels on rather than four, ventilated discs and different headlights and different bonnet.
On Alejandro De Tomaso
 At the launch of the Karif in Modena, it was announced that a Maserati works test driver, Giancarlo Baghetti, had managed to get this car from a 0-62mph (0-100kph) in 4.8secs.
One of the journalists got up and said: `Mr. De Tomaso, when are we going to be given the opportunity to find out whether this car will actually do 0-62mph in 4.8secs?'
This precipitated from de Tomaso a tirade of `you don't know how to #@/* drive. You're bloody Fiat, you don't like Maserati. You're not going to get an opportunity tonight.' This was the way de Tomaso dealt with the journalists and of course they loved him and wrote good things about him, as you could imagine.
One day in Modena there was a row about vanity mirrors, which were not going to be fitted to right-hand drive cars because of supposed projection dangers. I said to one of the Maserati people: `why don't you go and tell Mr. De Tomaso that Fiats and even Volkswagen Polos have a vanity mirror' - in other words it was not beyond the wit of man. So he did. I was sitting not very far away in these open offices and heard De Tomaso shouting `You #@/* liar, what the #@/* does he know, you're #@/* useless`. That's what he was like. People used to come out of his office shell-shocked because he'd just trample over them.
 De Tomaso made intensely crap decisions and I couldn't believe that he owned Maserati. He never looked at things logically and hated developing anything. What he liked was making a deal, getting a company like Maserati for next to nothing, and then moving on to the next project... the next project... There were always new ideas, new this, new that, like the idea building a three-cylinder 1.5 litre triple turbocharged Formula One engine (he had a casting of it in his office). It was never `let's get on and consolidate what we've got, let's do one thing at a time and build this car properly.' One day he said to Mario `We're not going to make any more red cars, because we don't sell any.' The administration had recently been computerised, so Mario got the printout of the sales figures and showed him that 35% of the cars they sold were red; for once he had to back down.
When the Spyder was being planned somebody told him that Zagato was bad at doing roof mechanisms, so it was decided that the roofs would be done at Modena. When Zagato sent the prototype over, De Tomaso said 'Where's the #@/* roof?' 'You told us not to do it', 'Oh, take the #@/* car away and do the roof.' That was his management style. He was an extraordinary man.
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After Maserati (UK) Ltd. moved to Leeds, Anthony Cazalet worked on in London for a few years for them as a troubleshooter. When he left, he became involved in the UK homologation for Mahindra motors and did one more job for the Maserati factory - the UK homologation for the Barchetta - another stirring tale for which, alas, there is no room...
John Price Willianis' new book, Maserati road cars 1982-1998, will be published in the New Year by The Crowood Press.
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