There’s something almost poetic about watching Jeremy Clarkson, a man who has spent decades gleefully dismembering automotive reputations with the enthusiasm of a demolition expert, get absolutely betrayed by a $320,000 Maserati MCPura Cielo. The engine quit on him. No warning, no dramatic finale, just silence on a country road between his farm and his pub.
Clarkson, who has treated a Ford GT like a grocery-getter and emerged from a Ferrari 12Cilindri with trembling knees, found himself stranded in the kind of scenario that would make any car owner nervous but is particularly humiliating when you’re the car guy. The Maserati, which had until that moment provided mostly “cheerful” experiences, simply decided it had had enough of hauling Clarkson around Oxfordshire.
Then came the resurrection. The car restarted on its own, as mysteriously as it had died, leaving Clarkson without answers and apparently without the nerve to attempt an explanation. He still doesn’t know what went wrong. The MCPura Cielo now sits abandoned in his driveway, collecting that special kind of melancholy reserved for luxury items that have failed spectacularly at their one job.
What makes this particularly rich is Clarkson’s admission of genuine sadness. He’s “heartbroken”, he says, and can’t bring himself to get behind the wheel again. For someone who owns Alfa Romeos and Bentleys this is quite the statement. The man has willingly subjected himself to Italian automotive drama for years, yet this particular breakdown was apparently the one that broke him.
Meanwhile, Clarkson’s actual favorite car remains the Lexus LFA, a vehicle he drove over a decade ago and still hasn’t found anything to match. He felt tingles in his thighs behind that wheel, he admits, probably induced by the 4.8-liter V10 that pushes the LFA past 200 mph.
It’s almost touching. The critic who has everything still pines for the one that got away, while his quarter-million-dollar Italian mistress gathers dust, a monument to the universal truth that sometimes even the expensive toys break in ways that hurt more than your wallet.
