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F YOU have even the merest hint of petrol in your blood, the name of Maserati alone will be enough to set your pulse revving.

And if the howl of the Maserati Levante’s Ferrari-built V6 engine doesn’t stir something deep in your soul, then you have no business owning one.

It is, of course, easy to get carried away when discussing something new from one of the great names of Italian car manufacturing.

And just a few years ago, any suggestion that one day Maserati’s biggest seller would be a diesel SUV would have got you literally carried away – for some sort of psychiatric treatment.

But here I am, behind the wheel of that same SUV, only now with a new 350 horsepower V6 petrol engine in the front.

This is the 2019 model year version of the four-wheel-drive Levante - the car has only been on the market for a couple of years but already some tweaks have been made to the overall package.

But it’s the engine that attracts