“The second time I met [Ferrari president] Cordero di Montezemolo was one of the most awkward experiences of my life,” recalls Frank Stephenson. He had only recently been appointed as the first-ever design director for Ferrari and Maserati.
It’s all to do with the Maserati 3200GT. Penned by Giorgetto Giugiaro, with an Enrico Fumia–styled cabin, it would feature the last purely Maserati-built and -designed engine in a Trident-badged car until the MC20 came along, two decades later.
Although never an official US import, the 3200GT was a relative sales success. From 1998 to 2002, 4795 of them rolled out of the factory, nearly double what its Ghibli II predecessor managed in six years. The car did much to reignite marque interest, and the next challenge was returning Maserati to North America after an 11-year hiatus.
For that effort, out went the 3.2-litre twin-turbo V8, in came the Ferrari/Maserati F136 naturally aspirated 4.2-litre V8. The new car (called the Coupé or Spyder, but now known colloquially as the 4200) would retain much of the 3200’s exterior style, yet the 3200’s stunning “boomerang” LED taillights had been replaced with disappointingly “normal” ones at the very last moment. In the years since, numerous stories have sprung up as to exactly why.
“It had nothing to do with US regulations, quality control, or the Japanese,” chuckles Stephenson, citing several of the more popular conspiracy theories. “Luca di Montezemolo called me into his office. He told me that I was going to Italdesign to review a few things. Then he asked me what I thought about the tail-lights on the 3200.”
Stephenson, like everyone else, was a big fan. “I mean, who comes up with an idea like that? Today they’re normal, but back then, in the age of square rear lamps, Giugiaro had come up with a brand-new idea, so I told di Montezemolo I thought they were a stroke of genius.”
“Then he said, ‘No you don’t.’ But I said, ‘Yes I do.’ Then he said, ‘No, no, no – no you don’t.’ I was thinking, am I getting into an argument here?” Stephenson remembers.
Despite having an illustrious CV at Ford, BMW, and MINI, he admits that just starting the world’s best design job meant he had serious imposter syndrome – and now he was under strict instruction from the boss to go down to ItalDesign and tell Giorgetto Giugiaro that he didn’t like the signature part of the 3200’s design.
“The next week I was in Italdesign’s showroom,” Stephenson says. “I didn’t speak Italian then, so I had a translator from Ferrari with me. Giugiaro was showing me the cars, and then we came to the back end of the 3200, looking at the boomerangs. I asked the translator to tell him I didn’t like the taillights and they needed to change. Giorgetto flipped.
“He has a fairly high voice to begin with, and it just got higher – it felt like I was being screamed at by an angry Italian housewife. So I asked the translator, and he said not to worry – ‘I won’t tell you what he said’ – but I was shaking in my boots because I was telling the god of design what to do: Who the hell am I?”
In the end, the lights were changed for the launch of the 4200. “He was so angry, he designed the most boring thing he could come up with – and that’s what we went with,” Stephenson says.
So why the determination to mither the master? “I later found out Montezemolo wanted to establish my rule within the Ferrari group, and unless I made a big statement, it wasn’t going to happen,” Stephenson muses. “My job was to make these guys listen to me – and it worked.
“Giugiaro and I ended up being very good friends, but it was a terrible experience. There was no real reason to change the lights.”
