CarThrottle featured a story on July about a Citroën SM equipped with a V8 Engine. We did an article about it titled “The SM V8, The Improbable Car” back in the Spring 2010 edition of Citroënvie Magazine. (Available in our Newsletter archives on the Citroënvie website).
Responding to a directive from Citroën, Ingenior Alfieri, the Maserati’s engine maestro, who had hastily created the SM’s original 2.7L V6 engine when Citroën took over the company, responded to Citroën’s V8 request building on another 2 cylinders to the V6 of the SM, (a V8 engine that was different from the Maserati Bora, that many have erroneously stated served as the basis for the SM’s V6 design by Alfieri lopping off 2 cylinders from it.) Tested for over 10,000 miles in a red SM around the area of the Maserati factory in Italy, when Peugeot bought Citroën in 1975 (then in bankruptcy), they decided to kill the SM and sell off Maserati. Consequently the engine was pulled out and stored with other prototype engines at the Maserati factory.
Maserati was saved by Italian government funding and in 1975 the company was taken over by Alessandro de Tomaso. De Tomaso was no admirer of Citroën and especially the SM because he had tried to purchase Maserati in 1968. Alfieri’s SM was destroyed in 1975 by order of De Tomaso himself. Sweet revenge in his mind since his failed bid against Citroën for control of Maserati.
The V8 engine remained untouched at the Maserati factory until 1993, when De Tomaso sold Maserati to FIAT. It was sold into private hands and then, in 2009, Phillip Kantor bought the engine and decided to reinstall it in a SM; The same model and same colour as the original one. He turned to specialist Frederic Daunat, to do the job.
It is that car, the one and only V8 SM, that is featured in CarThrottle. You can read their article here.
