Why This Maserati MC12 Corsa Owner Saves His Fast Laps For An LMP2 Prototype
The Maserati MC12 Versione Corsa is still the most powerful Maserati ever built, and only 12 customers got to buy one. You’d expect any owner to treat it as a lap-time weapon, but the one Larry Chen toured on his YouTube channel mostly gets driven for its noise.
It lives on a 10-acre private compound about 9 miles from Kuala Lumpur, alongside a go-kart track, a drift track, and a garage full of race cars. Its owner, a former Ferrari Challenge racer, saves his fastest laps for something even more extreme.
The Maserati MC12 Corsa Is An Enzo Built For The Track
Maserati built the MC12 on the Ferrari Enzo’s bones, borrowing its chassis architecture and its 6.0-liter naturally aspirated V12. It wasn’t a straight copy, though, since Maserati’s carbon fiber monocoque used Nomex honeycomb instead of the Enzo’s aluminum honeycomb.
The MC12 Versione Corsa followed in 2006 as a customer version of the MC12 GT1, which won the 2005 FIA GT Manufacturers Cup. It wasn’t homologated for the road or any race series, so Maserati hand-picked 12 buyers and invited them to private track events. Pricing started at roughly $1.28 million.
Without the GT1 intake restrictors, its V12 made 745 hp at 8,000 rpm, and the car weighed about 2,535 lbs without fuel. Ferrari’s track-only Enzo, the FXX, went further with a 6.3-liter V12 making 789 hp, but its owners joined a factory test program. They fed data to Ferrari’s engineers and left the maintenance to Maranello.
The MC12 Corsa, by contrast, was a championship-winning race car sold to customers, and its Malaysian owner sums it up as an Enzo in a different dress.
Zen Low Drives His MC12 Corsa For The Sound, Not The Stopwatch
Zen Low owns this MC12 Versione Corsa, chassis number 11, and knows his way around a race car. In 2017, he became the first Malaysian to race the Ferrari 488 Challenge, scoring eight podiums in 13 races and finishing third overall.
He still hasn’t set a hot lap in it at Sepang. The seat was too big for him, and the car is worth too much to risk for a lap time. If Low wants speed, he says he has an LMP2 prototype for that.
Low claims his Ginetta LMP2 runs an LS7 V8 making about 670 hp and weighs around 1,984 lbs. He says it’s faster than a GT3 car even while cruising, but it’s so planted that it feels like a vacuum cleaner stuck to the tarmac. It also sounds like an AMG, while the MC12 screams like an old Formula 1 car.
That noise is why the MC12 gets out at all, though it’s covered less than 62 miles across two Sepang sessions. Low even uses cast-iron rotors on track, saving the original carbon ceramics for the next owner.
A 944 Turbo with about 3,700 miles leads the rest of the garage, and it now runs a Garrett hybrid turbo. It shares space with a GT86 packing a 380-hp Lexus V8, a BMW swapped with a twin-turbo LS3 V8, and a two-cylinder Fiat 500 for comic relief.
From Dodging Architecture Classes To A Car Nerd’s Dream Job
Low grew up in Kuching, on Borneo, where his father gave him four career choices: accountant, lawyer, architect, or doctor. He picked architecture and moved to London, but spent eight years of weekends at Donington Park, Silverstone, and kart tracks. His dad called him home without a degree.
In 1994, a childhood friend from a politically connected family hired him to manage hundreds of cars across London, San Francisco, and Malaysia. Low set up a garage and flew in technicians from Bugatti, Ferrari, and Rolls-Royce to keep the fleet running.
He later sold his security business, and at 32, his wife gave him three years to go racing. Sponsors and his customer race team, Aylezo Motorsport, stretched that into 15 years, including stints in the Asian Le Mans Series and the Bathurst 12 Hours.
When COVID stopped racing, he flattened an RC car dirt track, built a drift track, and had a friend teach him to drift. Now 57, he’s passing the baton to his son, who went from a simulator to a GR86 race car two months after graduating.
Source: Larry Chen via YouTube
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