1987 Maserati Biturbo Spider Is Our Bring a Trailer Auction Pick of the Day

A 1987 Maserati Biturbo may not be most people’s first impulse when looking for a vintage car, but it’s undeniably nostalgia inducing.This car has a twin-turbocharged 188-hp 2.5-liter V-6 and (a good thing) fuel injection.
The car is up for sale until Tuesday, April 19, on the Bring a Trailer auction site, with bids at $15,000 as of Friday.

Nostalgia is a potent elixir. This is particularly true in vintage-car purchases, where each generation, upon reaching middle age, becomes distanced enough from the horrors of their youth, and endowed with more than enough gelt to sustain themselves on ramen and Gallo, to be ensnared by splendidly horrible vehicles that were impossibly out of reach as new. Today’s pick of the day from Bring a Trailer—which, like Car and Driver, is part of Hearst Autos—is just such a car: a 1987 Maserati Biturbo Spider.

This reminds me of a story. In the mid-1980s, when I was a scholarship student at a fancy private school in suburban Detroit, many of my classmates were, not surprisingly, the children of auto executives. One of my closest friends was the scion of General Motors CEO Roger Smith. Though Mr. Smith later became infamous as the antagonist in Roger Moore’s Roger and Me, he was a hero to me, because he allowed his son to borrow all manner of vehicles from the company’s competitive intelligence fleet, and his son often allowed me to get behind the wheel.

Bring a Trailer

One of these cars was a 1987 Maserati Biturbo convertible. And its sonorous 188 horsepower of turbocharged and intercooled V-6 bombast—experienced top down, and surrounded by enough pleated caramel leather to supply a Donna Karan factory, during one of the few sunny Michigan spring days—is etched in my mind as firmly as the antagonistic slogans scrawled in Wite-Out on my combat boots.

People bemoan these cars’ unreliability and finicky tune, but many of these problems were resolved by the incorporation of fuel injection in ’87 (this one has it), and most others, in enduring cars, have been shaken out.

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This one, from the collection of a Maserati dealership owner, has been thoroughly gone through to prep it for daily-driver duty. And with small-diameter steelie-look factory alloys, a rebuilt dogleg five-speed manual, raised-white-letter BFGoodrich Radial T/As, and just 41,000 miles, it also seems like an ideal time machine. With concours-condition models going for just $15,000, it’s also likely to be a steal. I’m going to have to try to restrain myself from bidding.

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