Greetings fellow chatters. I am just in the process of booking my 2005 F430 F1 coupe for an appointment at the Ferrari dealer. The car is due for its 15,000 mile service. I just bought the car about 5 months ago and have been very happy with it. I think the brake pads are worn and an orange engine malfunction light has recently come on but other than that the car has been functioning perfect. Does anybody have any hints or suggestions to offer? How much do you think this will run me? Thanks.
The brake pads have sensors and the "brake" light will come on when the pads are nearing replacement time. Depending on the kindness of your dealer, a set of pads should be 750-1000 installed. The CE light is most likely something very minor that they can reset without actually performing any repairs. 15K service does not really apply since service is done annually and consists mostly of fluid changes. some are changed every year, some every other, so the cost of the serivice is more some years than others. I've been paying about $400. in even number years and $1000 in odd number for my 2005. 30K service does require a few other things but I have some years left to get there. Check your manual and service booklet for detailed info. Dave Dave
I recently took my 05 F430 in for what I was thinking was just annual maintenance but I also had a F1 gearbox warning light that was intermittently coming on and after a few seconds it would go off, so it didn't seem like a big deal. It turned out that I had a leak in my F430's F1 gearbox bleeder valve. The symptoms were that the slow down light came on once and intermittently the F1 gearbox warning light flashed but not together, the car would act normal after a few seconds, so I did not think much of it. After the dealer told me that the Valve was bad and needed to be replaced, I looked at the records on the car and the first time it was taken in for this diagnosis by the original owner it was under warranty but the result was the dealer tightened up the bleeder valve and replenished the gearbox fluid and the lights stopped coming on.....at least for a while the problem seemed solved. The lights and symptoms returned after I bought the car from a friend. This time I took the car in after the warranty was up and this time the diagnosis was to replace the valve, but that did not fix the problem, it seems that the pump for the F1 gearbox had been running 5 times normal and had worn out trying to keep up with the leaking valve so I needed a new valve and a new gearbox pump, so 7 grand later the car runs perfect and yeah it was out of warranty by the time the second diagnosis occurred. Be sure to have them run the tests related to the F1 gearbox and how much the pump is running during shifts, that should tell you a lot about what is actually going on. Hopefully it is only a valve which should cost you under 1500 to fix otherwise get ready for the big one.
