Review: Drive a Maserati GT and you'll be swept off your feet

— -- If you can talk about the Maserati Gran Turismo high-performance coupe for more than two minutes without using a naughty innuendo, you should get a prize. We'll try to remain prizeless.

Just looking at the $121,000 GT is enough to make you vibrate, so you can imagine what happens when you actually drive it.

You lean into the throttle coaxing the Maserati-designed, Ferrari-built, 4.2-liter V-8 into delivering as much power and speed as your lawyer and bank account can handle. And you wonder: If this is a car, what are all those frumpy lumps of metal getting in your way? Or, if those are cars, what on earth is the GT? Because it's sure not like those.

Should you be so bold or reckless, or have access to a racetrack, you can hit 173 mph flat out, Maserati says. You'll notch off the first 60 mph of that run in about five seconds, quick enough to keep you pinned firmly to the seat.

Fine. It'll go. But there's a lot more go for less dough available: Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 ($107,000), Dodge Viper SRT-10 ($90,000) and Nissan GT-R ($78,000) all scream to 60 mph in four seconds or less and are 190-200 mph cars.

So if you're a performance purist, skip the Maser. But rapidity isn't really what the GT is about. It has enough zoom for bona fides, but mainly you buy a Maserati GT for the looks. Including the ones you get while driving it. Not everybody will have seen the Maserati GT, so you'll get a lot of what-the-holy-Ned-is-that stares. Italian automaker Maserati sells only about 2,500 cars a year in the U.S., about 60% of them the GT.

The price explains a lot. For that much money, you certainly should get exclusivity and envious stares.

Every nationality, it seems, has an automotive signature. Detroit, muscle; Japan, zippy and reliable; Germany, solid and stolid. And Italian, breathtaking — visually and otherwise. The Maserati clearly lives up to its Italian imperative.

But if the test car — a base-level 2008 model (the '09 is mainly unchanged, Maserati says) — was representative, you wouldn't buy a GT for top refinement and top quality any more than you would for absolute top speed.