348 - change of perception?

Quick question. When you say most of the problems weren't sorted by Ferrari, are you saying that the changes made between the '89 cars and the '94 GTB/GTS didn't correct the problems you see in the earlier cars? I ended up buying a '93 registered car which has most of the changes that Ferrari made (think most were made to the production line late '91 and my car was rolling down it in '92). Other than rear spacers, what else would a late car require?

 

http://ferrarichat.com/forum/showpost.php?p=140584590&postcount=36

From a previous thread but relevant to this discussion

 

Pete, Welcome to fchat and the 348 brotherhood. Couldn't of said it better myself.

I receive compliments all the time from the sounds and the looks people can't believe its over 17yrs old.

Cheers

 

Pete:

Welcome and, as has previously stated, a great first post.

Being new to FChat, I would like to introduce you to Dave Helms (see above). I will refrain from embarrassing him with accolades, but the best advice I can give you is - when Dave speaks, listen (or, more correctly, writes/read). The man is truly a paragon.

 

Our intrepid man-about-town. LOL

BTW, it's great to see you posting again.

 

^^^^

Boys, WTF is going on with Scott, WHY IS HE BANNED?!?!?

 

Welcome to the 348 Brotherhood Pete.

 

Yes, absolutely welcome .... please post pics of the car when you can !

 

Circumvented the profanity filter in P&R...

Kai

 

Thanks all, for the welcome both to fchat and into the 'Brotherhood'. She's in have some work done but here are are some pics from before she went in. (trying to resize as being rejected, sorry if they come out like postage stamps!)
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She's in pretty good nick, I looked at 5 others before I saw her and her bodywork in particular was much better. Got a specialist to inspect her before buying and they said mechanically she's in good condition. I know the advice is buy on condition rather than milage but she's only got 24,000 on the clock (backed up by MOT check and Service history so hopefully legit) which although not a big deal, can't hurt. Got to know one of the guys at the Specialist where the work is being done pretty well and he's sending pics as they do the work so at least I can see how things are progressing. She's looking a little more forlorn at the moment with her engine out and rear end removed etc but I'm going down the route of getting everything tidied up including the engine/ engine bay etc. Seems worth it while the engine is out anyway.

 

Wonderful!!

Oooh, you're in the UK too - I hadn't realised until now! I'm currently living up in rainy Glasgow. If you ever get the urge for a change of scenery, I can direct you to a few fun twisty roads near Loch Lomond that your 348 would undoubtedly perform well on. Hehehe

It's definitely for the best to get things tidied up all at once, it's what's best for the car and good peace of mind for when you later want to go for a vigorous drive. Do feel free to post the servicing pictures as well, I feel like half of the fun of Ferraris is that they're more difficult to service than a standard car and so quite like seeing the maintenance/restoration photos.

All the best,
Andrew.

 

Looking good, Pete.

 

No problem Andrew. I'll see if I can get a few clear ones over the next few days and post them. The first days worth I have look kind of like they're shot through a soft focus lense. That's ok for me coz its kind of how I see my car everytime I look at her but others would probably appreciate a clearer view of what's going on.

 

Sy good to see you still lurk once in a while

You have an interesting job there mate

 

Always around, after all this is my favourite forum section in the whole wide world.

Just wish I could make some $$$ from it.

 

As requested earlier by Andrew I've started a thread in this section entitled 'Cam belt service and detailing on a 348' showing the work I'm getting done.

 

Enjoy your car for what it is, but I would take all of the old articles with a grain of salt.

I think the 348 would have edged out the basically 14-year old 328 in 1989, but IIRC the media reception to the 348 was lukewarm, and quality problems didn't help. (Although Porsche replacing the bulletproof 911 with the leaky 964 the same year Ferrari retired the bulletproof 328 probably kept parity in the market...)

 

Hi there Jon. I guess the main point of my thread (if there is one) is that the media 'reception' of the 348 was anything but luke warm. Best in Show, voted one of the Top 10 cars ever, all road and track tests I can find say it was basically fantastic in every way, waiting lists over 5 years. All that suddenly changed and that change just happened to coincide with the a new boss taking over at Ferrari and saying that the car was a disappointment. Prior to that point it was regarded in an entirely different way to afterwards. The car is almost 20 years old so concepts such as aerodynamic undertrays as the 355 sports were not used by Ferrari but the media origionally spoke highly of the 348. As I said the largest US motoring Mag (I think) raved about the car putting it in the top 10 ever made. This was the reception of the top TV motoring show:

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5UC0gYG4Mg[/ame]

While they didn't go as far as Road and Track they seemed to like the car. Luke warm? Sorry but I disagree. I think the media said what they thought, later I think there was a hell of a lot of jumping on the band waggon, not wanting to look like they hadn't spotted the 'problems' the Ferrari management said were there and I think these comments were made by LdM for personal reasons to secure his place in the company, not because there were huge issues with the car.

 

Small correction: Road & Track didn't call the 348 "One of the 10 Best Cars EVER", but they did name it "One of the 10 Best Cars in the World, 1991" (December 1990 issue).

When Car & Driver did their 5-car "Supercar" comparison test in September 1990, the 348 was voted in fourth place out of the five, MILES behind the Acura NSX and Porsche 911 Carrera 4, well behind the Corvette ZR-1, and only slightly ahead of the Lotus Esprit Turbo SE. The shifter, seatbelts, steering wheel location, and handling (!) were described as "inexcusable". The magazine's test driver described the 348 as "a terrible car to drive fast".

 

Sorry, quite a big correction so thanks, had info second hand which is always dangerous. No excuse though. Regarding your second para, odd isn't it that 4 articles I read from '89 put the 348 ahead of the 911, NSX and Lotus. I've never read a comparison to a Corvette. One question, if the car has such inate handling issues, why the early successes at Le Mans? Why did the Ferrari dev team allegedly use it as a test bed for the Enzo?

My take on it is the 348 has a very tunable chasis. Set it up right, you'll get great results as they did with the GTCs. Get it fractionally wrong and you'll have problems. Putting it into terms I deal with, a modern jet fighter is aerodynamically unstable. It needs to be to get the performance. Fall one side or the other of its flight envelope and you'll have a snag on your hands. For its day the 348 was designed to be more akin to a race car on the road than its predecessors. Lower CofG with dry sump, new way of building a chasis etc. Did they get it perfect? No. Was it a huge step to take in comparison to previous models? Yes. Can it be set up to handle? Did ok at Le Mans (albeit in the GTC guise).

I've found many of the serious detractors have very little personal experience of the 348, not that I'm necessarily including you in that but what's your hands on experience? Also that many who have any type of handling issues have tried numerous complicated fixes. Once you go down that path I'd guess you could end up chasing your tail. Some 348s undoubtedly have some issues, possibly in the same way as some early 911s did. Porsche's answer was to test drive them all and put lead in the bumpers of any that displayed slightly unstable tendencies. When your 'flight envelope' is so narrow you'll get cars that fall either side of it. Porsche fixed them on a car by car basis (without the owners knowledge I might add). Ferrari didn't. Handling issues on some 348s sound surprising like on some early 911s. Has anyone actually tried just shifting the CofG forwards and dropping the nose a tad? Worked for Porsche.

 

Actually found out Porsche used iron weights rather than lead. Just thought I'd get in there before the corrections came pouring in.

 

Again, I think you need take it with a grain of salt. There were waiting lists because 1990 was the tail end of a period of stupid speculation in modern Ferraris -- 328s were bringing $150K+, if you could buy one, so people queued up for 348s just to flip them for cash. Anything with a Ferrari badge was snapped up like Google stock. Frankly if they had made a 348 turbodiesel wagon they would have sold out years in advance.

Not sure about LdM's motives, but it was pretty common perception that Honda smelled blood in the water when Ferrari came out with the 348, and that the NSX was better in every way except the badge. That may be why the 308/328 ran for 14 years and the 348 was pulled after 5 years in favor of the massively tech'ed-up 355.

Motor Week, by the way, tested a lot of Camrys and minivans, and I wouldn't rate them up there as a source for much.

I think it is fair to say that, now that performance is secondary because the 348 is an older car, we can appreciate the car's charms away from the harsh and revealing spotlight of road tests.

I do remember that. Lotus always got a fail on its shifter and bizarre ergonomics, and the NSX was viewed as the car Ferrari should have built.

This I hadn't heard - do you have a source/link? That would be interesting, because IIRC the 360 had been in production a few years when Enzo development started.

The Porsche 'iron ingot' story I believe was back in the ''60s or early '70s, when engine power had made oversteer more of a problem than it had been on the slower 356s.

I'm not a 348 'detractor', just someone who has been around all of these cars enough not to hold any of them in sacred regard. Knowledgeable owners here can anticipate, fix and retrofit around the cars' weaknesses, but most buyers of new Ferraris weren't looking for a DIY project. We all tolerate the 348's (and other Ferraris') deficiencies because we appreciate the qualities of the cars. The loved-from-day-one 308 always had its balky gearbox, weak cooling (especially QVs), crappy power windows, weak electricals, poorly designed ignition, etc., and it took a massive redo in the form of the 328 (after 10 years in production!) to get a well built car. The 348 had begun to improve by the time the Spiders came out in '94-'95, but LdM brought out the 355, which brought a whole new world of technology that also had its own set of problems. Again, the media fawned over it for a while, but ask the techs who worked on these cars when new and you will get a better picture.

Given FChat, the Internet and the collective knowledge you can tap into here, as well as the low prices on these cars now, a 348 is a reasonable Ferrari to own, but it had and has some real design problems that prospective buyers need to know about. The press was pretty clueless in 1989, in the same way speculators probably didn't bother to drive the car before buying one. I enjoy the old clips and articles as much as anyone, but it's a disservice to new lurkers and shoppers here to dismiss the fact that these cars were problematic when new.

 

Well said by the Chairman ...

 

All noted and some good points made. I guess my point is that a lot of the opinions I heard about the 348 prior to buying one was from people who had never or rarely driven one but had read all about the problems. I was almost put off buying a 348 by all the press/opinion out there then I drove a 328, a 348 and a 355 and really can't tell what people were talking about. IMveryHO it was the best driving experience of the 3. Alive, responsive, engaging. I couldn't fault it. I know a few owners have snags with handling and as I know an ex Ferrari race engineer (F1, Le Mans, etc) I've spoken about the causes. In my line of work I also know some people who know a lot about aerodynamics, albeit going a few hundred mph faster (fast jets). Basically the 348 has a very narrow envelope aerodynamically which when you slip outside will make the car less than stable at speed. Get it right and it'll be fine but it takes finer tuning than you'd normally encounter in a road car. I've waffled about it a bit at this link

http://www.ferrarichat.com/forum/showthread.php?p=140872973#post140872973

Its not a problem on all 348s because small changes in weight distribution, angle of attack etc will null it out and careful ballancing of grip between front and rear will help a bit.

Obviously I appreciate all points of view and I'm not shoeing you in to the crowd as a detractor, but the 348 has been described as the worst Ferrari ever built which is quite frankly rubbish. They can be made to handle extremely well but in the opinion of people I've spoken to who really understand Ferrari tuning at a high standard and aerodynamic forces, most people's efforts at camber settings etc, while they may help to dampen the problem, will not address the main issue. Le Mans tuned GTCs were basically the same car, although highly modified. A glance at their results will show that they didn't handle badly.

Re the 348 being used as a test bed, heard it on here as well as another forum, hence the allegedly. Not getting caught out with that one again Last question, mate, if you don't mind. What experience do you have of driving 348s, especially quickly? Not trying to catch you out, just curious.