621 hp Nettuno only for MC20
But the tech that makes it so impressive will be used elsewhere
Maserati‘s fancy new 621 hp V6 isn’t going to be used in any vehicle other than the brand’s new supercar, but before you look at it as another oddball like Cadillac’s Blackwing V8, the all-new V8 installed in only a few hundred cars, the technology that made it so potent will be trickling to the company’s other models.
The Nettuno V6 is a 3.0L twin-turbo engine that without the help of electric boost can offer 621 hp. But, as Maserati’s chief engineer Matteo Valentini told Autocar, “the Nettuno is built only for the MC20, so you will see it only on that car.” No Nettuno in the Levante, Ghibli, or Quattroporte, then.
If it seems a waste, don’t worry. “The plan is that the technology from it, particularly the twin-combustion system, will be used on many other engines in the future,” said Valentini.
For the Maserati MC20 supercar, the company looked at using larger turbos and e-boost to get the extra power it wanted without turbo lag. “When we analysed it, we decided that was expensive, not very reliable and very complicated,” Valentini said, and for Maserati to ignore it for those reasons things must have been quite frightening.
Instead, it’s used pre-chamber twin-combustion technology that has a second chamber and spark plug for each cylinder, where they can be injected with fuel and fired separately to provide more optimised combustion with better response and lower consumption and emissions. This technology will expand to Maserati’s other engines, and it could even be brought to more of the wide range of Stellantis brands. We’re sure that SRT would love to get tech like this when it comes time to replace the 6.2L supercharged Hellcat V8 with something a little more thrifty but equally powerful.
