MASERATI GRECALE TROFEO

Can this supercar V6-powered SUV belatedly do for Maserati what the Macan has done so successfully for Porsche?

- JAMES DISDALE

TESTED 28.3.22, LOMBARDY, ITALY ON SALE SEPTEMBER PRICE £90,000 (EST)

You could be forgiven for asking where Maserati has been for the best part of the past decade. It’s not so much that the Italian brand has vanished completely, rather that it has been missing in action from vital areas of the market. Nowhere has this been more obvious than when it comes to SUVs – cars that since the turn of the century have been surefire money-spinners for any brand with more than a hint of premium appeal and a desire to stay solvent.

No SUV has demonstrated this more decisively than the Porsche Macan, which over the past eight years has been a staggering sales success and proved to keen drivers that high performance and a high centre of gravity needn’t be mutually exclusive. So it’s a surprise that Maserati has waited so long to try to steal a slice of the Macan’s ultra-profitable D-segment SUV pie.

Of course, the Grecale isn’t the first Maserati with a mud-plugging vibe, but the larger Levante of 2016 managed to fall between two stools, being neither as compact nor as driver-focused as the Macan, and failing to pack the presence and overpowering muscle of the Porsche Cayenne.

On paper, however, there have been no such mistakes with the Grecale, which, along with the sensational new MC20 supercar, has been charged with breathing much-needed new life into a brand that has been largely moribund over the past decade.

So while the newcomer is no doubt late (very, very late) to this particular party, Maserati claims it will be the breath of fresh air (Grecale is the name of a Mediterranean wind, so there you go) required to tempt customers into one of its showrooms, many of them for the first time.