An interesting car showed up at my shop the other day. It was a 1971 Maserati Ghibli SS Spyder. I try my best to work exclusively on carburetor V-12 Ferraris, but will occasionally reconsider. Ghiblis have always interested me and in fact many years ago before I bought my 330 America, I had considered buying a project Ghibli Coupe to put back together. I have often wondered how different my life may have been if I decided to restore a Ghibli instead of my Ferrari!

Given this chance to work on this rare Maserati spyder, I decided to dive deeper into these Italian cars and see how Maserati did it differently than Ferrari.

Since this car was a new purchase and I was working for both the broker and the buyer, I started my work by performing a compression test.

I found this Ghibli suffered the same issues with Ferrari with fragile Vilatoni turn signal stalks. These stalks were specfic to Maserati and even more expensive to find than Ferraris, so repairing what was on this car was the only choice.

Luckily the turn signal stalk had not completely snapped off, so I was able to use my plastic repair kit and reconstruct the assembly.

I also agreed to fix an oil leak I found on the valve covers and found the oil was not coming from around the valve cover gaskets, but from under the acorn nuts that secured the valve covers. The copper washers that were previously used were not working too well, but the viton and aluminum sealing rings supplied by MIE, the Maserati parts supplier, were installed.

Here’s the video I shot on my first drive in the Ghibli Spyder.