Sometimes your wallet won’t stretch to purchasing your dream motor. But don’t worry too much, there are some cars that even the biggest bank balances can’t buy, the dream cars that will forever remain a dream. These are the concept cars that never go into production.
Maserati Boomerang
A Daily Telegraph headline of recent times described the Boomerang as the best car that never made production, which considering this Maserati’s contemporaries is a bold claim indeed.
The Boomerang was developed and showcased from the same Wedge design sensibilities which had given life to the Lamborghini Countach, the Lancia Stratos Zero and the Alfa Romeo Carabo - amazingly shaped supercars which looked decades ahead of their time.
Designed by Giugiaro, the Boomerang most distinctive feature is possibly the huge steering wheel which has at its centre the speed dial and all relevant instrumentation.
Giugiaro may be bettered remembered for his sharp angled designs of the Mk1 VW Golf and the 1976 Lotus Esprit, but it was the Boomerang which the enthusiasts craved. Originally debuted at the Turin Motor Show in 1971 and was registered as a road-car, even though it was technically a non-functional model. Living up to its name, the Boomerang kept returning to a long list of motor shows through the early 1970s, before a visit to the 1974 motor show in Barcelona saw it sold to a private individual where it found a home in Benidorm of all places.
The Boomerang was lost to the public world for several decades, and though the Italian company had developed a commercial simile in the form of the Maserati Bora, the original was lauded when it made brief appearances through the 1990s, before new ownership, a facelift and restoration brought it out of its self-imposed hiding.
The Boomerang’s beauty was recognised more recently as the star of a series of Louis Vuitton advertisements in 2014 and in the last few years has become a star of the auction room, changing hands for multi-million dollar fees, most recently fetching a cool $3.7 million under the auctioneer’s hammer.