Maserati MC20 - long-term review

In January 2017, Peter Maddox, an octogenarian owner of a yellow Vauxhall Corsa, woke up to find his car had been vandalised. The windows were smashed, panels damaged, and the word ‘move’ had been scratched on its bonnet. Why? Because it was parked outside his house in Bibury.

Bibury is the chocolatiest of chocolate box towns. Once described as the most beautiful village in England, it's a place that now thrives on the dopamine hits of social media validation. Without wanting to be, it’s become a social media institution, with coachloads of TikTok tourists piling onto the banks of the River Coln to selfie in front of the cute 17th-century weavers’ cottages.

Peter owns one of these diminutive 17th-century weavers’ cottages. He also owned a yellow Vauxhall Corsa – which he parks outside it. Because it’s his house. But because tens of thousands of tourists invade the village of 580 residents to feed the algorithm and get a like from it, they wanted it gone as they saw it as an eyesore. So someone smashed it up, causing £6,000 of damage. Which is ironic, as Peter's little Vauxhall was a beacon of individuality in a sea of filtered sameness and cars should be colourful because, Peter, a retired dentist, should be able to express himself how he likes.

Mad, eh? The heat on poor Peter started way before the damage, with someone posting "picture postcard street photobombed by ugly little yellow car" on Twitter in 2015. Luckily, the yellow car community clubbed together to make poor Peter feel better.

Locals collected money to help the 84-year-old get a new car. Someone even came up with an idea to stick two fingers up to the tourists by organising a yellow car cruise through the village to show the support of the mustard-coloured Corsa. The idea caught on. There were so many yellow car owners willing to take part that the number had to be limited due to safety reasons. Even Vauxhall bosses were touched by his story and named their shade of yellow ‘Maddox Yellow’.

This yellow car drama spurred me to conduct an experiment: would our very yellow £300k Maserati MC20 provoke the same digital pitchforks?

Wanting to show solidarity for the yellow brethren, I took our yellow MC20 to Bibury as a sign of defiance. But it did make me wonder if TikTok would have the same reaction as they did with the Corsa with a £300k Italian supercar. After all, the MC20 is a stunner in real life.

Set against the Cotswold stone, it has proper mid-engine supercar proportions, low, wide, curvaceous, and covered in carbon. In fact, it’s a bit too low for the Cotswolds. The MC20 does have a nose lift, but boy oh boy, it loves to chin itself around town. And on the gnarled crowned roads of the countryside, it basically does a 50-50 grind around the lanes as it graunches its way to the horizon.

Knowing that carbon tubs aren’t cheap, it makes you wince and gnash your teeth together, as there’s little sound deadening, and you feel every bit of gravel through your rectum when it gets stuck. But there’s nothing you can do. Given it’s wearing its floor out, it could help with some weight loss, as Ollie Marriage recently put it on the scales and it weighed 1,680kg against the 1,495kg they claim. Which is a whole piano’s worth of weight.

Despite its ostentation and the visceral concert of gravel pinging against carbon, the MC20’s reception was oddly muted. Locals and dog walkers were actually interested, asking for photos and taking pictures rather than shooing it away on Twitter. Maybe it’s the doors – swinging up, not out, in a theatrical TikTok-friendly flourish. Or perhaps, just perhaps, it’s a sign that even amidst the chocolate-box conformity, there’s room for a splash of yellow – if it’s audacious enough.