There's a lot of smoke and mirrors and hearsay about the Karif.
Rumour has it that in order to maximise publicity Alejandro De Tomaso requested that the press cars were specially tuned to deliver the 285 bhp that is often quoted, he wanted to make a statement and wanted the Karif to appear as quite an animalistic car. It is said that these engines did not last long and that the chassis couldn't really handle it. It is thought that customer cars actually produced the same 250 bhp that was seen on the 228, 430, Spyder and export market 222, mechanically the engines are identical and carry the same engine code of AM473, so the press cars may simply have been chipped. There are however some rumours that customers could make a special request for the higher output engine but no-one knows how many were specified as such. There is a small postscript in the Biturbo manual which makes refernce to this higher power output that could be requested. Further evidence of most customer cars being of a lower power than quoted at launch is that the catalysed versions produced for some markets developed a mere 225 bhp, it is hard to believe that a catalytic converter could sap such a significant amount of power when on other models with identical engines, the differences between cat equipped cars and non-cat equipped cars was 25 bhp. It is also said that Maserati later stated that they would not be considering the fitment of the updated 24v engine because the chassis couldn't handle the extra power which rather blows their initial power claims out of the water. On the face of it a Karif is just another model in the Biturbo lineup but due to its rarity and the perceived wisdom of extra power it now seems to command a hefty premium. Having said that I think they're rather cool and its nice to see at least some of the Biturbo models are getting the recognition they deserve.