MC20 and MCPura

Maserati MC20 and MCPura

For nearly two decades, every Maserati road car built since 2002 had a Ferrari-sourced engine under its skin, a legacy of Maserati and Ferrari's shared ownership history within the Fiat/Stellantis group. That arrangement ended around 2019-2020, when Ferrari's then-CEO confirmed the supply deal would wind down, pushing Maserati to design a bespoke engine of its own for the first time in a generation. The result, revealed on July 1, 2020, was the Nettuno: a 3.0-liter twin-turbocharged V6 named for the mythical figure behind the brand's trident emblem, and the first product of a newly built 'Maserati Engine Lab' inside the historic Modena factory.

The Nettuno was notable for being built in-house, and more so for how it burns fuel. Its signature feature is Maserati Twin Combustion (MTC), a pre-chamber, twin-spark ignition system adapted from Formula 1 engines, where the vast majority of production cars had never used pre-chamber combustion at all. A small pre-chamber ignites a portion of the air-fuel mixture first, sending a turbulent jet of pressure and flame through tiny holes into the main combustion chamber to trigger a faster, more complete burn; a conventional spark plug takes over when engine load doesn't call for the pre-chamber. Paired with both port and direct injection (a 6-bar port rail and a 350-bar direct rail), the system lets the Nettuno make 630 PS / 621 hp and 730 Nm of torque from a relatively compact displacement, output that had previously required forced induction pushed harder or bigger displacement to achieve.

The car wrapped around that engine, the MC20, was unveiled September 9-10, 2020, in Modena, after an originally planned spring debut slipped due to the pandemic. It arrived as Maserati's first clean-sheet mid-engined supercar since the Ferrari Enzo-based MC12 of the early 2000s, built on a new carbon-fiber tub and wearing butterfly doors reminiscent of that earlier halo car. Customer deliveries began in 2021, and reception from the specialist press was strong: evo magazine named the MC20 its Car of the Year in 2022, putting it ahead of contemporaries from Ferrari, McLaren, and Porsche, calling it a modern supercar with old-school driver engagement.

Maserati broadened the MC20 lineup quickly. In May 2022 came the MC20 Cielo, an open-top spider with a retractable glass roof that folds in about 12 seconds and can switch from clear to opaque, adding roughly 65 kg over the coupe while giving up only a tenth of a second to 100 km/h. A fully electric MC20 Folgore had also been part of the plan since before the combustion car's launch, envisioned as a tri-motor design making over 700 bhp as part of Maserati's broader electrification push. That plan didn't survive contact with the market: in March 2025 Maserati confirmed the Folgore project was cancelled outright, before it was ever fully revealed, citing weak demand for a battery-electric supercar among buyers who, by the company's own account, wanted the sound and character of the Nettuno V6 rather than an EV. The cancellation landed alongside a rough patch for the brand generally, with Maserati's overall deliveries falling sharply in 2024 and Stellantis pulling back previously planned investment.

While the road car stayed combustion-only, Maserati built a racing program around the MC20 platform. The MC20 GT2 customer racing car, revealed in mid-2022, marked the brand's return to GT-class competition and its first mid-engined customer racer since the MC12 era; it entered the Fanatec GT2 European Series in late 2023 with wider customer availability following in 2024, running a track-tuned Nettuno reported between 640 and 700 hp depending on configuration. That program fed back into the road car: in summer 2024 Maserati announced the MC20 GT2 Stradale, a road-legal, track-focused variant that borrows the race car's aerodynamic vocabulary (a larger front grille, bigger rear wing vents, revised splitter and diffuser, new forged centerlock wheels shedding about 60 kg overall), while keeping the same carbon tub, doors, and a barely-tweaked 631 hp Nettuno.

With the Folgore shelved, Maserati redirected its update budget into refreshing the existing combustion platform, and in July 2025 that update arrived as a rename: the MC20 became the MCPura for the 2026 model year, offered in both coupe and Cielo convertible form. Maserati explained the new name as a return to 'pure' driving, MC for 'Maserati Corse,' the racing division, Pura for the Italian word for pure, while Motor1 noted it also sidesteps the '2020' baked into the old MC20 name. Visually the MCPura wears a new trapezoidal grille and a front bumper borrowing cues from the GT2 Stradale, alongside floor and rear-bumper tweaks, but the heart of the car is unchanged: the same 630 PS Nettuno V6 that debuted five years earlier. Production was reported to start in the third quarter of 2025, with the first North American cars arriving around the end of that year.

Throughout this run, Maserati has not published an exact cumulative production or delivery count specific to the MC20/MCPura nameplate, consistent with how most manufacturers treat a still-in-production model. The only figures publicly available are Maserati's brand-wide annual delivery totals across its whole lineup, which are not broken out by model and should not be read as MC20-specific sales.