Seeking 355 Challenge in US

Nice. Perhaps I'll see you at the track with my street-registered 355Ch. I won't be driving it from Seattle, though the well-damped Challenge suspension is actually not bad on the streets. Ear plugs and head protection advised.

 

It's a lot cheaper to buy a challenge car with all of that already fitted along with the added coolers and uprated brakes.

I'm basically doing that with my car piece by piece. I have the challenge grill, wheels and exhaust along with stiffer springs, but that's the easy stuff. You're looking at $6k just for brakes, a couple of grand for a custom bolt in cage that can be removed for the street, lots of $$ for all of the small added coolers if you want to go the whole way (the rear brake cooling setup is like $3k for real parts), better seats etc. I got my car fairly cheaply as these things go, but if I want to get to full on challenge spec it will end up more than I could have bought an actual challenge car for, and by quite a bit.

 

They are still possible to ging, I totaly agree!

 

What's the story in the us about title ... Sorry I am from uk?

All years have vins and are recorded at the factory as berlinettas

They are crash approved etc ...


I had to go through a process of demonstrating this to uk road register my 98 car.

It was treated as a barn find, but did not need an individual vehicle approval, which is where they test and measure everything, because in the uk it was deemed to be a street legal car converted at the factory for racing purposes and then returned back to street legal

Street legal in the uk meant it had to pass an MOT, all uk cars have an mot each year after 3 years old.

This was relatively straight forward, I needed headlights and indicators and a horn

Hand brake was interesting fix, it has to be mechanical ... Jon at GT cars sorted that very cheaply without changing the big brembos... Light for the reg plate...

Think that was it


So interested why you can't make a 98/99 car ... The best btw ... Street legal in us


Re: why don't you convert a road car, you can and many were raced in period ... But take a look at the differences and there are a huge amount ... Eurospares.co.uk have the schematics

98/99 cars were basically factory cars ... Very different under the skin

 

excuse my ignorance .. how does a title work.


we have a V5 document that is proof of ownership.

However, cars are registered by the dealership when they come into the country,
I guess like the uk because the 95 cars came into the country as road cars they were registered, and subsequently the 98 cars were basically factory race cars and didnt need to be as they were not by then seen as cars for the road (this doesnt however mean that they were not, just that nobody had any reason to register them - as they didnt have all the stree required parts etc)

So in the uk I guess I had the same dilema, and this is where the concept of a 'barn find' car comes in, this also holds true for agricultural machinery (which are not always registered at day 1)

I had to go through a process of optaining a V5 for a car that from a 'crash testing, saftey, etc' perspective was totally legal. But just had never been registered.

It took alot of phone calls, and eventually it turned out that the difficulty lay in the various computer systems that various departments had.

The main issue was that the people who issues the V5 needed to check with the revenue service that all taxes had been paid. Guess how that worked ?

well in early 2000's the revenue guys created a computer system to record all the cars that had paid tax on, basically to track gray import cars make sure taxes were being paid. In order to backload the current population of taxed cars they used the populatioon of cars on the V5 system....

so when i applied for a v5, they said they could issue it because it wasnt on the revenue system and thus didnt exist!!!

there was no argument as to whether it was eligble to be registered, it had a valid vin
(decode it and it says UK rhd 98 355 as any other standard 355 would)

so to cut a long story short .....

after afew months and gathering photos and documentary proof.

they issued a V5 and a registration


...


so i guess in the US if you really want to you probably could register a 98 cars
on the proviso that it would pass state vehicle requirements, emissions etc

its a very different car under the surface, but you can definitely make it behave for the day its tested

 

No. In the US each of the 50 States has its own titling and registration laws, and many require an inspection to register even a properly titled car, which cars with roll cages and without exhaust, horn, headlights, etc. won't pass. Retrofitting the necessary equipment in those States robs the car of what made it a Challenge car in the first place. There are also federal laws that govern what cars may be street-driven. A car's EU-legal status means nothing here.

 

Most states also have emissions laws that require obdII for cars made after 1995. As all challenge cars are obd1, you could only pass inspection in a state (or county within a state) that did not do emissions testing as they hook a computer up to the obdII port and a '96 up car without an obdII port is an automatic fail.

 

You could be right. I don't think you will be far off. Brake ducts are brake ducts and while not priceless ferrari unless you pay big bucks can be fab'ed up for under $100bucks. All safety gear will need to be changed anyway. A bolt in cage is just lame that's why they are not allowed in SCCA or NASA except for maybe one really low level class to make the cars look like racecars. No one serious about safety would use a bolt in unless it was an aluminium chassis and the bolt in's I see even in the 458 is totally lacking but legal. If yu saw what the better bolt-in cages with integral seat frames looked like in aluminum Z06 corvette racecars you would laugh at what Ferrari puts in the 458. I did not know there were extra coolers but coolers are maintenance items and routinely replaced in racing. Cost for an aftermarket is about $1000 for a combo diff/tranny and often less if increasing cooler size on an existing system like you need a bigger oil cooler. I did not know the 355C had bigger brakes. I thought they were the same as stock just different OE pads. Others did put bigger brakes on but did not know that was part of challenge package. But you are right that's $6k right there for 4 wheels but you probavbly only need front axle and stoptechs will do fine and have been proven on 355's to work.

The other issue is almost every 355C has been hit. You have a much better chance of buying a straight streetcar plus you have 5 model years to choose from vs. just the 95 you can title and you still need stock catted exhaust, lights, turn signals, license plate lamps side markers etc to make it legal plus try and title a racecar. That is not any easier than converting a street to trackcar. You can find used ferrari cats but new ones are like $6-8K! Some locations you can use cheap aftermarket cats and pass for $40 bucks.

Finally, on a streetcar you can sell all the stuff that does not make your car faster and repurpose that money for new race parts. I remember getting stupid money for 348 parts during my conversion like $800 for foglights and $700 per side mirror.

Anyway, either path is very fun and the important thing is the Ferraris get exercise as Enzo intended.

 

My NY colleague is correct about the need for a title in order to register a car, but in the US you won't have one unless you have a proper VIN. Every Ferrari Challenge car has a VIN (even 458s), but nothing later than a '95 355CH has a title- the later cars have a VIN that indicates that they are not US-legal road cars.
As I noted above though, there's more involved in getting a titled car registered than having merely having that title, at least in States that require any sort of safety inspection- which most Challenge cars will fail without significant modification. By the way, few US 355CHs have headlights, and the covers are usually welded shut- be prepared to spend time and money rectifying that issue if you're going to drive on the road after dark.
You'll also want to ensure that the roll cage is well-padded (with the new, high-density stuff), and even then hitting your helmetless head can be fatal.
There are also other legal considerations which, as I've intimated before, I'm unwilling to discuss in a public forum, but in any event you'll need a State without either safety or smog inspections to get a car registered- not that that is dispositive of the question.

 

Headlights are no issue .. just buy a set from a crashed 348 or 355 they just swap over.
(the later cars come with a cover but nothing else)

roll cage comes out really quickly if you need it out for testing

i actually have access to a 95 car that has no roll cage and standard road brakes, which takes away some of the fun, however the fast rack, and fiorano springs make it far superior to the standard 355 drive... however its not in anyway as much fun as the whole 98 experience



the obd1 vs 2 thing ... if thats the law then thats a killer ...
how does that work? there are plenty of cars that are newer than 98 that dont have obd2 ?

how in the US to i register a barnfind, recreation or a kitcar?

emissions and other stuff is easy. there is nothing particularly different about the engine ..
you can stick a stock exhaust on (mine came with 3), and run standard ecu's if the race version emissions are not legal (mine were ok for uk emissions)

do the us cars vins decode to a non road legal description?
does someone have an example?

 

creating a challenge car is very different to building a 355 race car ...
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and theres more
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and even more
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then there are the coarchwork differences .....
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so my point is here that i think its important that we start to recognise the importance of the 355 chanllenge cars, especially as road cars.

By the time ferrari had finished the 98/99 cars were the most developed 355 ever, a lot of time and effort was put into them.

There is a 348 GTC, 360cs, 430 scud, 458 speciale ... No 355 special

there was the last 100 fiorano handling pack cars (there were afew european hard top fiorano cars too) but these were just an effort to get rid of the last cars not a car that had a huge amount of development thought put into it.

note the 355ch uses the same brakes as the F40LM etc etc

so actually this puts the 355 challenge in a very interesting position. Especially the final factory cars.

In my view they are the collectors 355.

 

How so? You just add some more cooling, the requisite stiffer springs and modified shock damping, add required safety gear and remove everything you don't need and voila, basically the same thing as a challenge car. There are no chassis or drivetrain differences (unless you consider a different clutch a big difference), all of the main changes are cooling and suspension related. The suspension changes involve no geometry changes, just shocks/springs/bushings, so yes, building a challenge car is basically the same thing as building a 355 race car.

That said, I agree that the 355 challenge is a special car. The '95's were the last Ferraris that could be legally driven on the street and raced, at least in the US.

 

As of 2 weeks ago, the 355C was the only car at the Ferrari Museum in Maranello that had it's very own room/display besides a very early F1 car. It is truly special. Even the F40LM was put in a room with several other cars.

 

Brendan,

Does the F355C on display look like this?

Barry
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My roll cage (the original OMP bolt-in version) was far from easy to reassemble after part of it was temporarily removed. Certainly not something to take lightly in US States that have annual inspection.
Yes, the VIN on US Challenge cars post-1995 decodes as non-US road-legal- that's why you can't easily obtain a title, much less register them and thereby obtain license(sorry, "number"!) plates.