Perhaps a razor blade lay next to the drawing board when Giorgetto Giugiaro began designing a car in 1971 that was more pointed than any before. Nevertheless, the car received a road legal license, and it was also driven by a number of owners. His form still triggers astonished shaking of the head today.

Giugiaro had already signed for Fiat Automobile, for Bertone and for Ghia, before he set up his own business with a partner in 1968 and founded the company Ital Styling (today: Italdesign). One of the first orders for the young company came from Maserati. Giugiaro designed the sports car Bora, the first mid-engined model of the Italian brand, which was presented in 1971. A quite reasonable supercar, which was 275 km / h fast, but also offered a full-fledged trunk.

The dream of the extreme car

Giugiaro, however, apparently dreamed of a far more extreme car, and he realized that: At the Motor Show in Turin in the fall of 1971, Italdesign presented the Maserati Boomerang. Wedge-shaped bodies were in fashion at that time, but this was not a wedge-shaped design, but a blade made of metal and glass. As flat as no car before.

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Nice thing: Maserati Boomerang

The trapezoidal windshield rose at an angle of only 13 degrees from the horizontal. The whole car was only 1.07 meters high, consisted almost exclusively of dead straight lines and smooth, flat surfaces and completely renounced ornament.

First the case, then the technology

The car was designed so radically that when he first appeared in Turin he was just a sculpture without technical interior. This followed a few months later at the Geneva Motor Show in 1972. There was the Maserati Boomerang again, this time driving the ingredients from the production model Bora and thus including a 4.7-liter V8 engine with 314 hp and a top speed of an estimated 300 km / h - that's what nobody knew.

It was not about driving the car, but watching, admiring, understanding. The shape of the bodywork, the mistaken design of the 15-inch wheels, the abrupt rear, the almost completely glazed doors, from whose two large windows opened each lower one. And Giugiaro obviously took a look at the Lamborghini Marzal, which had caused quite a stir a few years earlier.

The Maserati Boomerang, in turn, was able to do that thanks to its daring, circular cockpit. In it six round instruments as well as various switches were arranged directly in front of the driver. All around, like a kind of revolving handle of the whole construction, the steering wheel protruded.

No wedge like many others

If you glance at the car, it is one of many sports car wedges that were in vogue at the time. But that the Boomerang stands out from the body-beating, is no coincidence. In hardly any other study of this era of car design, lines and shapes are as reduced and concentrated as in the Maserati one-of-a-kind. Giugiaro indicates once more in what his championship was, which manifested shortly thereafter in production models such as the VW Golf I, the Fiat Panda or the Saab 9000th

In the early 1970s, the boomerang toured several car shows, until it was bought by a bar owner from Benidorm after an exhibition in Barcelona in 1974. Thereafter, the car was temporarily in the possession of a German Maserati collector; later he went through more hands. In the meantime, the car was thoroughly restored, the electrical system completely redesigned, and from time to time it appeared at various automobile events such as those in California's Pebble Beach or in the Italian Cernobbio on Lake Como.

In 2014, the car served as a retro utopian prop for fashion shoots by the French company Louis Vuitton and in September 2015, it changed hands at an auction held by Bonhams for the last time. About the new owner of the Boomerang is known only that he paid 3.3 million euros for the car. It is still roadworthy, but no one knows whether and in what intensity the previous owners also used the two-seater. An odometer is not in the Maserati Boomerang anyway.