Maserati has always been the redheaded stepchild among high-performance-car makers. Over the course of 95 years the company has veered from victorious to also-ran, from world-class to why bother, from legitimate to ludicrous. The founding Maserati brothers sold out back in 1937, and since then the company has gone through a variety of owners: the wealthy Modenese Orsi family, France's Citroën, Argentinian entrepreneur De Tomaso, and finally the Fiat Group, which has owned Maserati since 1993 and from 1997 to 2005 put it under the control of its Ferrari division.

Before World War II, Maserati never achieved the stature of Alfa Romeo; soon after the war it was playing second fiddle to Ferrari; and it's never been able to cash in on the glorious chapters of its past. Few remember that a Maserati won the Indianapolis 500 not once but twice, in 1939 and '40, the only Italian car ever to do so. (Ferrari failed miserably in its one run at the Brickyard, and Porsche did little better in its three tries.) But all too many remember Lee Iacocca's "Chrysler TC by Maserati," a dreadful late-1980s convertible that was the automotive fake Rolex of its time, a flabby economy K-car with a Maserati badge and little else.

Maserati's best-known model, the Quattroporte (Italian for "four-door") high-performance sedan, reflects the erratic driving of its parent, long underappreciated, and from 1991 to 2004, unavailable in the United States. The original, introduced in 1963, was the world's first sports sedan with a competition-derived engine and tubular-frame chassis. The 2004 Quattroporte, the fifth generation, was an entirely new design, almost a four-door prancing horse, as by then Maserati was under Ferrari's wing. The car was powered by a Ferrari-designed V-8 engine and had a paddle-shifted manual transmission (no clutch pedal) based on Ferrari Formula 1 technology, which Maserati boasted was a bonus for its sporty buyers. Big mistake. The gearboxes were clunky, and it turned out that Quattroporte buyers weren't that sporty. All Quattroportes now have extremely sophisticated, fully automatic six-speed transmissions.

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