2025 Maserati GranTurismo Trofeo First Drive Review: Who Needs a Private Jet?
This is how the wealthy traveled in the days before exclusive air travel.
Oh, the tragedy of the Maserati GranTurismo Trofeo! Nearly everyone who buys one will take its name in vain, idling it through quietly lush neighborhoods on the way to a salad and mimosa brunch somewhere expensive. This fast and voluptuous 2+2 coupe will never get to stretch its long legs on a high-speed highway, scattering slow-moving Fiats and Fords like autumn leaves while it cruises at triple-digit speeds, leaving its occupants stirred, not shaken, and ready for a glass of Champagne when they arrive at their hotel.
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Well, almost never.
What Is It?
Umbria, in central Italy, flies below the radar. Tuscany, whose embrace includes icons of the Renaissance like Florence, world-famous vineyards, and the villas of millionaire celebrities, gets all the headlines. But Umbria’s food, wine, scenery, and culture are more than a match for that of its glamorous neighbor. The 2025 Maserati GranTurismo Trofeo we collected from the company’s HQ at Viale Ciro Menotti in Modena, where fast and exotic cars carrying the iconic trident logo have been built since 1939, seemed to sense our eagerness as we headed southeast along the autostrada to the region they call the green heart of Italy.
Under the hood of the new Maserati GranTurismo Trofeo is a mildly detuned, wet-sump version of Maserati’s snarling 621-hp 3.0-liter twin-turbo Nettuno V-6 that powers the mid-engine MC20 supercar. In GranTurismo Trofeo trim the engine makes 542 hp at 6,500 rpm and 460 lb-ft of torque at 3,000 rpm, and it drives all four wheels through an eight-speed automatic transmission. That’s enough grunt, Maserati says, to get the 3,957-pound coupe from 0 to 60 mph in 3.3 seconds and to 124 mph in 11.4 seconds on its way to a 199-mph top speed.
The 2025 Maserati GranTurismo Trofeo’s suspension layout is multilink, with air springs and electronic damping control, and the car’s vented disc brakes are clamped by Brembo calipers. It has a staggered wheel-tire setup, with 20-inch wheels up front and 21-inch wheels at the rear wrapped in 265/35 and 295/30 Pirelli P Zero or Goodyear F1 tires, respectively. Unlike the more mildly tuned (490-hp and 443-lb-ft) GranTurismo Modena, the Trofeo gets an e-diff, and there’s an extra drive mode—Corsa—available when you twist the rotary controller on the steering wheel.
What the Eye Sees, and More
The new Maserati GranTurismo Trofeo is distinguished visually from its less powerful Modena sibling by way of subtle side skirts and more aggressively styled front and rear bumpers. Inside, the seats feature perforated leather with a herringbone motif. All GranTurismo models come with a 12.2-inch configurable digital dash, a 12.3-inch infotainment screen, and an 8.8-inch comfort control screen, as well as a configurable head-up display and voice activation of the climate control, media, navigation, and phone via the “Hey, Maserati” function. You also get a digital rearview mirror and Apple Car Play and Android Auto connectivity. One gripe: Gear selection is by way of buttons, strung between the two screens at the center of the dash, that feel cheap and aren’t intuitive to use.
A New Old Experience
Back in the 1950s and ’60s, in the era before private jets, powerful and luxurious gran turismos were the fastest and most comfortable way to get around Europe. The 2025 Maserati GranTurismo’s interior is appropriately cossetting, with front seats that leave you feeling fresh after a day on the road. Yet it is roomy enough to accommodate four people for short journeys, as our guides Monica and Marco discovered as we tiptoed the Trofeo through narrow medieval streets into the center of Bevagna, a delightful town near Perugia that dates to Roman times.
These days Italy’s autostradas are strewn with speed cameras, which makes the speed-camera monitoring system of the GranTurismo’s TomTom-based navigation system a lifesaver. More than just warning you of an upcoming speed camera, though, the system will also monitor your pace through sections that are controlled by cameras that can work out your average speed between two points. That helps keep the GranTurismo Trofeo moving as fast and efficiently as possible.
Even so, we were able to ascertain—purely in the pursuit of journalistic accuracy, you understand—that in GT mode the GranTurismo’s V-6 barely turns 2,250 rpm at 100 mph in top gear. GT mode, the most relaxed of the Trofeo’s drive modes, is indeed best for open freeway cruising or tooling around town. On light throttle, one cylinder bank will shut down, helping the car achieve what Maserati says is best-in-class fuel efficiency. That said, our first gas stop saw the GranTurismo Trofeo average just 18.2 mpg over 195 miles of mostly highway running.
GT mode’s downside is the fact it’s just a little too relaxed: You need to punch the gas hard to get the car’s transmission to wake up and kick down two or three gears if you want to overtake slower traffic. For quicker response, it’s better to click the downshift paddle.
The Trofeo’s Corsa mode allows you to have fun with the throttle, but it’s best left for roads you know and where you have room to play. It doesn’t take much ambition to get a twitch from the rear axle when you go to power, but the chassis telegraphs its punches well. It features all-wheel drive, but the GranTurismo Trofeo feels like a classic rear-wheel-drive GT—a car that likes to brake in a straight line on corner entry and then be balanced on the throttle as you pass the corner apex.
We found using Sport mode with the transmission in manual mode to be the best all-around setup on the two-lanes snaking through the Umbrian hills, especially when we wanted progress to be smooth and quick. The characterful Nettuno V-6 likes to be kept spinning; anything above 4,000 rpm is its happy place. If you use the transmission wisely, you can hustle the GranTurismo Trofeo at near sports car pace.
A Few Small Issues
There are a couple of caveats here, however. First, full-throttle upshifts in Sport mode can produce some thumping shift shock, so you must learn to feather the gas slightly as you tug the paddle. And second, the suspension is a touch too stiff at legal road speeds, the vertical motions fast and insistent. Switching to GT mode made the suspension feel soft yet crashy on the indifferent Italian back roads leading up to the Borgo di Carpiano, our hideaway deep in the Umbrian hills, with not enough fine control of either body or wheel motions.
The suspension tuning is the 2025 Maserati GranTurismo Trofeo’s weak link; the car should feel supple yet controlled, regardless of what’s going on beneath the wheels. The fact that in almost every other way this Maserati absolutely nails the brief implicit in its name makes this doubly frustrating.
Reasonable Priced for Its Class
The 2025 Maserati GranTurismo Trofeo certainly looks the part, with its long hood flowing back from a low-slung grille dominated by a large version of the company’s famous trident badge, a fast roofline, and voluptuous hips cinched down over the rear wheels. And when you remember cars of comparable road presence and similarly storied badges, such as the Aston Martin DB12, Bentley Continental GT, and Ferrari’s Roma, cost about $55,000 to $115,000 more than the $190,000 (base) Trofeo model, it looks like a relative bargain, too.
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t fascinated by cars. My father was a mechanic, and some of my earliest memories are of handing him wrenches as he worked to turn a succession of down-at-heel secondhand cars into reliable family transportation. Later, when I was about 12, I’d be allowed to back the Valiant station wagon out onto the street and drive it around to the front of the house to wash it. We had the cleanest Valiant in the world.
I got my driver’s license exactly three months after my 16th birthday in a Series II Land Rover, ex-Australian Army with no synchro on first or second and about a million miles on the clock. “Pass your test in that,” said Dad, “and you’ll be able to drive anything.” He was right. Nearly four decades later I’ve driven everything from a Bugatti Veyron to a Volvo 18-wheeler, on roads and tracks all over the world. Very few people get the opportunity to parlay their passion into a career. I’m one of those fortunate few.
I started editing my local car club magazine, partly because no-one else would do it, and partly because I’d sold my rally car to get the deposit for my first house, and wanted to stay involved in the sport. Then one day someone handed me a free local sports paper and said they might want car stuff in it. I rang the editor and to my surprise she said yes. There was no pay, but I did get press passes, which meant I got into the races for free. And meet real automotive journalists in the pressroom. And watch and learn.
It’s been a helluva ride ever since. I’ve written about everything from Formula 1 to Sprint Car racing; from new cars and trucks to wild street machines and multi-million dollar classics; from global industry trends to secondhand car dealers. I’ve done automotive TV shows and radio shows, and helped create automotive websites, iMags and mobile apps. I’ve been the editor-in-chief of leading automotive media brands in Australia, Great Britain, and the United States. And I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. The longer I’m in this business the more astonished I am these fiendishly complicated devices we call automobiles get made at all, and how accomplished they have become at doing what they’re designed to do. I believe all new cars should be great, and I’m disappointed when they’re not. Over the years I’ve come to realize cars are the result of a complex interaction of people, politics and process, which is why they’re all different. And why they continue to fascinate me.Read More
