Ferrari Mondial . Net

Spring is almost here, and it’s taken it’s time…. so you might well be itching to start doing some spring like jobs on your Ferrari to wake it up from it’s winter hibernation. A guy called Birdman has an excellent website focusing on servicing and parts for the 308 and Mondial, including great guides on brake pad replacement, brake calipers, cooling system, and timing / cam belt replacement. So if you are planning to do any of these I’d recommend taking a look at his site.

There is a problem with driving a Ferrari… the problem is getting back into a “normal” car. Where has the power gone from under your foot, and what happened to the glorious engine note at you hit 7000 rpm? This is especially bad if a) you only really take the Ferrari out at weekends when the weather is dry (thus for UK owners ruling out most of the calendar year), and b) your everyday, practical car may well be Italian, but it runs out of steam at 4000 rpm and seems to have about a tenth of the power, as in the case of my trusty MkII Fiat Punto 1.2L.

To solve the above I could drive the Ferrari Mondial all year round, but that would work out too expensive in terms of petrol (not to mention destroying the planet in the process), extra insurance, miles on the clock, wear from the elements, etc, and to be honest I don’t fancy some old lady reversing into the Mondial in the car park at Tesco. Clearly a bad idea all round, unless you are stupidly rich.

So my solution was to sell my Punto and buy something small, fun, economical and kind to the environment, but a car that still looks good and kicks ass! No not a G-Wiz, but a Smart Roadster Coupe Brabus: 698cc, turbo charged, 101bhp in a 750kg car… so about 130bhp/ton compared to my old Punto 60bhp/ton and Mondial with around 170bhp/ton (not bad!), 6 speed flappy paddle gearbox (so I can at least pretend I’m in a tiptronic Ferrari), traction control (including Formula one style start option), electronic stability program (ESP), 17in Brabus alloy wheels (bigger than the alloy wheels on the Mondial!), driver / passenger/ side airbags, ABS, and fully convertible via the simple push of a button on the dashboard, which is very cool to do at traffic lights. On the downside there are obviously only two seats and not much luggage space, but it’s a roadster after all

The Smart Roadster Brabus is very low and has a stiff suspension, it really hugs the bends, I’d love to take it to a track and turn the ESP off, see whether it was my clearly superb driving skills keeping me glued to the road, or whether it was the ESP computer (yeah ok it’s probably the damn computer!). Also with the ride being so low you get a much elevated sense of speed, doing 70mph on the motorway seems like 140mph, then you can always slide the roof down, at which point it feels like the 200mph barrier has just been broken (ignoring the fact that there are probably three wheeled Robin Reliants overtaking in the outside lane). But don’t get me wrong, it IS a nippy car, top speed 125mph, when the turbo kicks in it surges impressively.

The only problem with rapid acceleration is the well documented semi automatic, sequential gearbox. There are six forward gears, and the lower four gears are very close together, so to get from 0-60mph you have to change at least three times, unfortunately the gear change speed is way off the 100ms of a Ferrari, it’s more like 1000ms (yes, it must be getting on for a second by my estimation), so changing gear three times when going for a 0-60mph run will instantly add at least 3 seconds to the overall time, explaining why the official 0-60mph time for the car is 9.5secs! Apparently you can have the ECU re-programmed for faster gear changes, it might be something worth investigating.

So all hail the Smart Roadster, and FourTwos as I like them too, just a shame they stopped making the Roadster as I think it’s one of the best designed, economical and fun cars of recent years. Even Jeremy Clarkson liked the Roadster, and it was voted the Top Gear most fun car of the year 2005, beating the grotesque Mini Cooper. Gordon Murray (designer of the McLaren F1 Supercar) is also a fan and an owner, there are rumours he is involved in a British consortium that have bought the rights to start production again, this time with a manual gearbox, and badging the cars with the resurrection of the classic British marque AC. Hopefully they would also ditch the awful looking three spoke alloy wheels found on the majority of standard Roadsters. I don’t know about you, but I can’t help see three spoke alloy wheels and think of a 1990s BMW with tinted windows, driven by someone who is, without doubt, a drug dealer.

• Good review of the Smart Brabus Roadster from CarPages.co.uk
• Gordon Murray on his love of Smart Roadsters
• More about Project Kimber, the Roadster revival plan

As mentioned in an earlier post the passenger side electric window in my Mondial was exceptionally slow, often grinding to a halt completely when trying to go up, or at best stopping 1 inch from the top. Clearly in a rain drenched country this is not the best behaviour to have for a car window, but Ferrari Mondials, 308/328s and 348s are renown for this problem.

After doing some searches on the internet I came across a site by UK Ferrari Owners’ Club member Frazer Smith. He is an electrician who has looked into this problem in detail on his 348 and believes the solution is poor wiring: thin wires that are excessively long, providing poor earthing, resulting in the window motor not being able to draw enough current. You can read more about it on his site www.ferrariwindow.com

I ordered up a pair of his booster boxes, they arrived quickly and I was excited to see the difference they would make, especially after seeing the dramatic video on his site, and hearing about the success another Mondial owner had when he installed them.

Stripping the Ferrari Mondial QV Door

Please note the text and photos applies to the Mondial QV 3.0L 1982-1985. I know that the door release catches (and probably door panels) are different on the Mondial QV 3.2L and later models, so you will have to work those out yourself.

I eagerly set about stripping the passenger side door, see the following photos below for an illustration of the steps involved, there are quite a lot of screws to remove, be careful not to mix them up as some are subtly different (eg there is one long silver one, the rest being short). A good policy for avoiding getting confused is to draw the door on an A4 piece of paper, then lay the screws down on the drawing in the place you removed them from.

The first panel to be removed is the long, thin middle one. After removing the retaining screw at the rear end of the door it should slide out towards the rear, ie pushing towards the rear of the car if the door was closed. This will reveal lots more thick silver screws. It should be fairly easy to remove these and take off the panels one by one, but leave the panel with the speaker grill until last. The two steps to watch out for are:

Door Catch Panel
You need to remove the door opening/locking catch chrome metal surround before removing this panel. There is a small silver screw underneath the door lock catch, it’s a little tricky to get to, and you may need thin nosed pliers to lift it out once it’s unscrewed. The the door surround should now slide out slightly upwards towards the front of the door, but be careful as it’s a tight fit and may be sticky, so take care not to apply so much pressure it shoots out, scratching the leather in the process. In fact try to slide it out slowly so you can note how the back of the door catch surround has small runners which slide under the door release catch lever mechanism, as when you re-assemble the door you need to get these back under the lever so it slides back in properly.

Speaker Panel
As you take this one off be careful as the speaker is attached to the inside of the panel with wires disappearing into the door frame, you don’t want to rip these off! I found I could lay this panel face down inside the car on a small box, meaning I could still work on the stripped down door without having to physically disconnect the speaker wiring, but ensure you put a blanket down or something so as not to scratch or scuff the leather on the panel.

Right, the door should look pretty bare now, and if you lift up the flaps of cloth you should see the mysterious system of wires and pulleys that lift up the glass for the window. The motor should be in the door frame, behind roughly where the speaker sits. You can happily test the window with the door like this (though it’s probably a good idea to keep turn your engine on to prevent draining the battery). I noticed that the window did actually go up all the way fairly well like this (despite a couple of slow downs) and, I’m guessing this is due to less frictional resistance which would normally be caused by the door panel that seals the bottom of the glass on the inside.

As shown on Frazer Smith’s web site I measured the voltage across the motor when raising the window. When moving smoothly it was 10v-11v but dropped to 7v when getting stuck or slowing down severely.

The first thing I did was to remove some of the old lubricant grease which had accumulated in big, crusty blobs at some of the pulley wheels. I then applied some WD40, re-lubed up the wires and pulley wheels with some fresh mechanical oil, and worked it in by zipping the window up and down 5 or 6 times. This did seem to make the whole mechanism a lot smoother.

Next up was to try Frazer’s electric window booster box. Following the instructions on his site was easy. I shortened the wires that fed into the motor first of all, as there seemed to be about 15cm (6-7in) of slack coiled up in the door frame. The box stuck to the inside of the door no problem with some double sided tape. I managed to undo a nut which was bolting the motor to the inside door frame using a 90 degree sprocket wrench and a lot of small movements, then securely fasten the earth wire onto this. I did have to re-stick the booster box in lower position though, as I’d not taken into account the position the glass would be when I lowered the window… it was guillotining the earth wire as it approached the bottom, oops!

So did the booster box make a difference… well one thing I was pleased about was the whole window mechanism was a lot better, it now only slowed down in the two positions that it ground to a halt to before. I can’t be sure whether this was due to the booster box letting the motor draw just enough current to get past the sticky points, or just the fact that I cleaned and re-greased the mechanism (and shortened the excessively long wires to the glass lifter motor), but one thing is for sure: I now had a window that closed! I didn’t see the dramatic improvement that can be seen in Frazer’s video of his 348, though I have spoken to him (he is a really nice guy) and there are still some things I can try, as he seemed to think I should get the dramatic speed increase, as in his video. It may well be that the earth connection from the door itself to the rest of the car is not very good, so if I improve this then the booster box may kick in better. When I get some spare time I’ll probably give it a go and post an update.

My Mondial really does seem like it has come through a time warp in many departments. I already spent a few hours removing parts of an enormous 80′s style car phone which a previous owner must have gone to great expense to have fitted, even including a leather covered dashboard addition above the radio to clip the phone into (see pics below). Removing what I think is some kind of massive (probably 18in square and 10kg!) battery/transmitter from the boot certainly saved weight.

Though I love the purist idea of keeping the car as close to it’s original state as possible, one area of the car has been annoying me. I’ve only had my Mondial a week but I’m tired of having no music, the reason being the car still has the original Blaupunkt radio/tape player. It switches on and can get garbled radio reception, but it makes a very odd crunching sound if you try to put a tape in and doesn’t play them, not that I really have any tapes anymore anyway. Given that: all the Mondials I’ve been in (that would be five or so) have had CD players fitted, that I have a rudimentary knowlege of basic electronics, and I fitted a CD player to my old Ford Fiesta 10 years ago I thought I’d try getting an upto date head unit into the Mondial via a DIY upgrade! Although this guide is for a Ferrari Mondial it might also be applicable to Ferrari 308/328s. Indeed I’m guessing that there are few 80s Ferraris left with their original radios, so this guide will be of more use for people looking to upgrade a first generation CD player unith with a more current CD/MP3 radio with aux input for ipod or other external player.

Parts list for removal and installation (assuming original factory wiring and head unit):

• New head unit eg Sony Radio/CD/MP3 with Aux input (for ipod): £80
• Car radio release tools, see pic for tools needed to replace the original Blaupunkt. For newer head units check your local car accessories shop: couple of pounds
• screwdrivers, spanners, wire cutters/strippers, crimping tool (or pliers)

All my parts were purchased from Halfords.

New head units come with standard ISO connectors which are also found on modern day cars. My 1985 Ferrari isn’t going to have this standard ISO connector, so there are two options:

1. Cut all the ends off the wires on the car audio leads, cut the ISO connector off the head unit and splice them all together. This worked great for my Ford Fiesta I did 10 years ago, but it’s messey and makes future upgrades more difficult, plus it smacks of dodgy workmanship
2. For £20 more you can buy an ISO adaptor connector which has the plug one end and bare wires the other. These bare wires can then be crimped into one half of bullet connectors adaptors, with the other end going on the Ferrari wires (which will need to have their non-standard ends cut off), but the result it a neat, professionally done, and easily upgradable wiring system. You are working on a Ferrari after all. For this method you will need a couple more parts:
   • 2 packs of bullet connectors (8 male/female connectors total): £6
   • 1 car audio ISO connector adapter plug with bare wires one end: £15

Total cost of parts £100.

Step 1: Remove carpets and plastic covering panel

• Turn off you battery via the switch under the front bonnet (or if you do not have a manual switch then disconnect one of the battery terminal leads)
• a) pull back floor carpet
• b) pull away side carpet from velcro fastening at bottom
• c) unscrew big screw and 3-4 smaller screws along top of plastic panel covering the insides of the middle column

You should now be looking at something that resembles diagram 1b below.

Step 2: Unbolt old radio head unit and remove

Get your head down there in the footwell, you should now be able to see the back of the head unit. Look for the nut that’s keeping it bolted to a metal retaining plate (a good idea to keep it steady, avoid vibration and prevent it being easily removed).

• a) Undo this nut, be careful not to drop it as you may not be able to retrieve it!Thanks to Carl Verdi for revealing how to get to the bolt.
• b) Insert your head unit release tools into the pairs of holes either side of the front of the Blaupunkt. Push them in really far and then push them outwards to try to get a grip. It can be tricky as the radio is a tight fit in the metal sleeve. It’s much easier if you can get someone to push the unit from behind (where you just removed the nut from) as you pull the release tools.
• As the head unit comes out the aerial lead (usually on the back right hand side of the unit if you are looking at it from the front) may not have enough slack, so unplug it

• As the back of the head unit comes out of the dashboard, have a look at how the wires at the back are connected. You will have to unplug these to finally get the unit out, but if you have a non-original radio there may be a diagram on the unit which will help identify which wires are which (eg speak left, 12v constant, etc), so make a note
•  c) You can now remove the old metal sleeve that the head unit was jammed into, as more than likely your new radio will come with it’s own one that you can slide in carefully, according to the manufacturer’s instructions

Tips:

• It’s a good idea to put a cloth down over your warning lights and grear stick gate as dust, etc will likely spew out as you remove the head unit
• The front plastic face of the Blaupunkt may rip off, and the buttons explode everywhere. Don’t be too alarmed by this, but pick them all up so you can piece it back together later if you are bored
• Warning: the metal sleeve and old head unit edges (especially if the front has come off) are razor sharp! Get the old thing out of the car as soon as possible. I foolishly left it in the footwell while I carried on and it managed to rub and scratch some of the surrounding leather (grr!)

Step 3: Re-wire old style connectors

If you have just removed the original radio you should see the connectors in the photo, else what you see may be completely different as the original wires may have already been wired into newer connectors. You should be able to see the original wire colours somewhere. Basically if the connectors you have look like they are compatible with your new radio you are in luck and you can skip to the next step (fitting), if not then you will likely have to proceed below as though you had the original connectors.

Do steps 1-4 below for existing Ferrari wires: 12v constant, 12v switch, 12v ignition, speaker front right (positive and negative), speaker front left (positive and negative). Do one wire at a time to avoid confusion:

• 1. Cut the ends off the existing car radio wires
• 2. Strip the wires to 6 or 7mm
• 3. Use crimping tool (or pliers) to lock ends into female bullet connectors
• 4. Important: Use a permanent pen or some kind of system to label each female bullet connector or wire, as those brown wires will look identical after putting the female bullet connectors on!
• Your ISO adapter connector should have pre-stripped wires, attach the male bullet connectors to these
• Plug the male bullet connectors from the ISO adapter into the corresponding female bullet connector of your car wiring. My ISO adapter came with a handy colour code diagram on the back, plus all the wires had what they were printed on them in tiny print
• Insulate any bare wire ends not being used (these should only be on the ISO adapter side, unless you don’t plan to connect, or don’t have, the 12v switch wire that sends the Ferrari aerial up)

Step 4: Install new CD/Radio head unit

• Inset the metal sleeve that came with your head unit into the slot, and bend up all the fins you can to lock it into place. Warning: Be really careful when bending those fins, especially if you are using a screwdriver. I slipped as I was trying to bend one that wouldn’t actually budge, and very nearly gashed my lovely black leather above the gearstick, or even worse I was pushing so hard it could have gone right through. So either push gently, or use something blunt & wooden, rather than a sharp edged screwdriver.
• You can now finally slide in your new radio! Don’t forget to plug in the aerial lead first. The radio will probably be a tight fit into the sleeve, but should fit perfectly. Catch the ISO connector as it comes out the back into the wiring area, then simply plug it into your newly wired ISO adapter setup.
• Remember the retaining nut and plate that held the original head unit in place? My radio came with a smooth, protruding bar at the back, and a tight fitting rubber nut, so I used this to secure the unit to the back plate. I actually had to loosen the nut that was holding the back plate in place, then rotate the back plate slightly as it was hindering the wiring block on the back of the radio, stopping the radio going back fully. You radio might come with a threaded bar at the back, so you could use the original retaining nut. Either way it’s a good idea to lock it in place to this back plate to stop vibration, and for security (though if someone broke into my classic Ferrari I’d be more worried about the physical car damage rather than an 80 quid radio!).
• At this point you can turn your battery back on, and give the radio a test! Check that sound is coming out of both left and right speakers, that the aerial pops up when the unit is switched on, and that it goes down when the unit is switched off. Put all your wiring back into the central column, and reverse step one to get all the carpets back into place.You should be left with something like diagram 4 and an upto date CD/radio/mp3 player!

After some more driving today everything seems to be running smoothly in the Mondial: lights all working, air con cool, sunroof opens up great (tho needs a manual push to help it close), driver electric window slow but ok (a known issue with all Ferraris from this era, Mondial,308, 328, 348), and even the original Blaupunkt radio/tape player works.

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!