Well after 2 years of fantastic driving, and some unforgettable days out, I have to reluctantly put my beloved 1985 Ferrari Mondial Quattrovalvole UK RHD up for sale! The reason is I have another Ferrari in the pipeline and I simply need the garage space. It’s a great car that has never let me down and drives like a dream. I will be sad when it goes, and will never forget the distinctive roar of the engine spring to life, angrily gurgling away until replaced by the familiar purr of a warm v8. I guess, like some other things, you never forget your first Ferrari.

If you are interested in experiencing a little bit of Ferrari life then have a look through this blog, check out my YouTube videos, and contact me via the PistonHeads advert, or leave a comment below with your email address. I know everyone says this, but there really is nothing to spend on my Mondial: it’s had new tyres, a shiny new exhaust, new mats, window boosters, and even a new CD/Mp3 stereo, and it’s up for way less than I paid for it. Just whoever buys it better look after it, or else!

Apologies for this, do check the Hendon Way Motors website regularly (or www.autotrader.co.uk) but please refrain from calling him requesting Mondials. Specifically don’t call about the 36k miles Mondial with excellent Maranello service history that is still listed on their website, as that’s my one and it’s obviously sold :) It should disappear from the  Hendon Way Motors website soon. But please stop calling about Mondials for the moment else Anthony will go insane!

Hendon Way Motors do, of course, have a great selection of more expensive Ferraris, Porsches, and other marque sports cars.

If you are actively searching a Ferrari Mondial at the moment (Aug 2007) Verdi Ferrari have a couple of great examples in stock, so give them a call, ask for Carl, and tell him Mondial Steve sent you. He will probably have no idea who I am but say it anyway as he knows me when he sees me  Verdi Ferrari are renown for their depth of knowledge and excellent Ferrari repairs and servicing. I have personally met the current owner (Neil) and been for a drive in the red cabriolet for sale, it’s a great car with impeccable service history, so have a look.

Here is a quick compilation of clips from the first weekendof me driving my Mondial, plus at the end there is a few seconds of footage from the Italian car day at Birch Park, Colchester 14th July 2007.
Thanks to C for compiling the video and muting all the boring talking bits :)

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A few minor bugs and quirks did arise, as I was expecting for a 22 year old car, most of which I should be able to fix:

• driver side rubber door sill detached at the top (some super glue, should do the trick).
• stone chips: need to get a repair kit with primer and the right shade of Ferrari Rosso red. The paint code of the car is F108 and Halfords didn’t have this (surprise surprise), but they did have a fiat 108/96 so that might be the one… I’ll have to ask some Ferrari gurus if this is the one.
• rubbish boot/trunk catch: it’s pretty difficult to close the boot, requiring a short, sharp blast downwards. 50% power, 50% technique. I tried unscrewing the locking bar that drives into the catch and re-aligning it, plus making it protrude a couple of mm further, and also greasing up the latch a bit. It seemed to make it a little easier to close.
• cracked gear knob (!) umm no idea how this happened, but I was worried that the cracks would get bigger as there was a little movement on them when squeezing the knob, and it does have a lot of force put onto it jamming the Mondial into gear. Super glue to the rescue, seems to be held together a bit more rigidly now.

Slighly more annoying problems….

Speedometer dropping to zero during driving
I was cruising along the M25 at 70mph on my first day driving the car, had been on the road about 2 hours in total, and to my amazement, the speedo started wobbling for about 2 minutes, then dropped to zero (well right to the bottom reading which is 5mph)! So I only had my own rather poor judgement of speed to guage how fast I was going, not what you want on your first day of driving a Ferrari, especially on UK roads notorious for being littered with speed cameras and traffic police. On starting her up the next morning the speedo seemed back to normal again… however it did die again after a couple more hours of driving. I parked up for an hour with the battery switched off, set off again and the speedometer was ok. I was a bit worried so gave Carl at Verdi Ferrari a call. He told me not to worry, it happens quite a lot and could be some sort of (oil?) leak into some part of the speedo mechanism. I also looked it up on the internet and it seems quite common, a failed impulse generator is another cause. Anyway Carl reassured me that it could be rectified at not much cost (80quid or something like that). Thinking about it some more it’s possible that both times it died I had just turned on electrical devices in the car, the first time it died I had just switched on the radio and headlights,the second time the air conditioning. Could be a pointer to an electrical gremlin? Anyway I decided to keep an eye on it.

Update: about 150 miles / 4 hours of driving the next weekend and no problems at all, maybe it was down to the fact that the car had not been used regularly for 5 or more years. I did mention it to Anthony at Hendon Way Motors, he said that speedos on older Ferraris are pretty unreliable, it’s certainly something they would not have been able to spot before selling the car due to the intermittent nature of the fault, and the fact that it only happened after a couple of hours of driving.

Update 2: Spoke to a very knowledgable Ferrari Owner’s Club member who owns a 1985 Mondial QV Cabriolet, he says this is a common problem and happens sometimes on his Mondial too, he thinks it’s a loose connection behind the speedo in the dash (I guess made less stable by heat as the problem only ever happens after 90mins or more of driving?). Anyway this establishes it as a relatively common problem, so I won’t worry too much about it at the moment, it really has only happened 3-4 times in 9 weekends of driving, and is fine if the car is left for an hour or two (also explaning why heat build up triggers it..?).

Update 3: Problem did not appear at all in the whole of 2008 with car in regular use, morale of this story… don’t let your Ferrari sit in the garage, get out and drive it (as long as it’s not raining)!

Passenger Electric Window Very Slow
The worst and most obvious problem: the passenger electric window is very slow, and a helping hand is needed to close the final inch. At one point the window did actually refuse to go up at all, it would only go down. This was the last thing we needed as we drove along with rain clouds looming overhead. On stopping I found that opening the door, then grasping each side of the window with a palm, followed by a really hard push upwards from both sides (while getting an assistant to push the up button) got the window shut. Subsequently the window seemed to return to it’s usual self where it would happily go down and up, excluding the final inch.

As stated above, electric windows are rubbish on Ferrari’s of this era due to dodgy Italian wiring. Having a look on the internet I found www.ferrariwindows.com run by 348 enthusiast Frazer Smith. He provides a solution in home made, 12v booster units which can be wired into the door. The site also explains why the passenger window is usually worse than the driver’s window (much longer length of thin wire from the power source). I have ordered up two of these units and will give them a go this weekend, look out for a post on the installation procedure and results!

After seemingly endless week after week of rain and gloom I awoke on Saturday 07/07/2007 to glorious sunshire. Fittingly this was the day I could finally collect the Ferrari Mondial from Anthony at Hendon Way Motors! We arrived early to find the car having a final polish, the exterior and interior both looked great. I had my checklist of work that Anthony and I had agreed to be done, and we sat down to go through it. I knew that that garage work had taken a bit longer than planned, but I was amazed when Anthony showed me the receipt from the garage of all the work completed…. the total was over £2200 worth, at cost price to him, so this would equate to £3000 or maybe even £4000 to the average Ferrari owner in the street.

So it was time to pay up and finally get my hands on the keys, an original set complete with leather fop embossed with Mondial and a metal Ferrari logo shield on the other. Maneuvering out of Hendon Way Motors car park area was good practice, involving some tight turns round brick walls and metal gates. Going from my modern car with power steering, etc to the Mondial with no such luxuries, and a massive turning circle to boot, was always going to be fun, akin to wrestling a beast, but that’s exactly what I expected, and wanted!

After a slow and careful drive home it was time to take it for a serious spin, a 100 mile trip to Oxford and back! It was a surreal experience, people seemed to respect the car and either keep their distance or get out the way as they heard the roar of the engine coming. Not that I was even foolhardy enough to try to drive beyond my experience and skill in a new car, so I stuck to the speed limits as I always do. I even got overtaken by a Smart car on the A41 (see video below)

Overall very pleased with the Mondial from Hendon Way Motors, definately worth the wait in the end!

* Update Aug 2007: Please read this post before calling Hendon Way Motors about Mondials

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To cheer myself up I called to Anthony Pozner at Hendon Way Motors as I was certain the Ferrari Mondial would be ready, given that I’d been away for two and a half weeks. Anthony confirmed that the mechanical work had been completed, but unfortunately now the car was awaiting to go into the body workshop to have the minor issues dealth with. Again Anthony was very apologetic, I slightly hid my disappointment that it was not going to be ready for the weekend, and I pressed him to ensure it would be ready for Friday 22nd June (which would be six and a half weeks since I paid the initial deposit!). He couldn’t guarantee it but said he would do his best, which I hope he does, as I really would be openly disappointed if it wasn’t ready for that weekend, given that it’s the national Ferrari Owners’ Club meeting at Broughton Castle in Oxfordshire the following weekend.

I can only assume that the chaps at Hendon Way Motors really do a thorough job and check everything before handing over  cars to their customers. We shall soon see, and I’d rather everything be done properly in such a manner, so I’m sure it will be worth waiting for….

Well it’s a Vehicle Identification Number, and should be present in several places on all cars made after 1980.

I found an excellent online guide for decoding Ferrari VIN numbers here (they have not added the latest models to the code list, but you can probably guess them, it’s certainly handy for cars up to 1996):

http://www.nwrfca.org/faq/vin.html 

The guide also tells you where to find them on the vehicle. Clearly they should all match, and not appear to be tampered with in any way! I’m guessing that dodgy practises such as “ringing” doesn’t happen much in the classic car trade, but with some shady characters out there (potentially posing as respectable private traders) it can’t hurt to check.

It’s also probably a bad idea to reveal or inadvertently publish your VIN, registration number and tax disc (eg by posting photos on the web) in case some kind of criminal elements are out there watching, I imagine this information could be used in the practise of “cloning” (good BBC article on car cloning). So always remember to blank out this information in any photos you post on the web!

From decoding my forthcoming VIN I can verify that the information elucidated from the VIN
did indeed match up with the physical form of the car. I was a little worried though when I did an HPI check via www.mycarcheck.com, the car info was fine, but on performing the additional VIN check it reported that the VIN I had entered did not match those on record for the vehicle. I was a little baffled, but called mycarcheck.com the next day. It turns out that the DVLA only had the last 5 digits of the VIN (this would be the unique part of the code anyway), and these indeeded matched, so that was a relief

If only this one was mine…

Anyway the upshsot is that it will be going in on Tuesday of next week now (29th May), unfortunately I go on holiday to Sri Lanka for two weeks on that very day, so won’t really be able to collect it until Saturday 16th June, argh! Oh well, at least summer will definately be here and there are some good Ferrari Owners’ Club  meetings coming up when I get back.

Fingers crossed everything will be worth waiting for!