how much better is a 430 with full exhaust, tune and Scud alignment specs

I have exhaust/manifolds (retaining factory cats) and ECU remap. There is a difference, but it’s not neck snapping. The standard set map is fine though. Your biggest performance gains are to be had with a sportier wheel alignment and TYRES! Unless you have race experience, the car will outhandle you.


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I can share my experience of geometry setup. My F430 was on factory settings when I bought it and wore Michelin Pilot Sports.

At my first trackday I was unimpressed with the turn-in. It felt like the front had materially less grip than the rear. I was continually checking and reducing tyre pressures so it wasn't just overinflation. I could see and feel there was nowhere near enough negative camber; the outsides of the tyres were getting hammered and photos taken at the event of the car on track backed this up. I will dig one out and post one over the weekend. The rears were not worked particularly hard given the issues up front.

I changed the tyres to MPSS (standard widths 225 front and 275 rear) and geo to Scuderia specs. Turn-in was much improved, although still not enough negative camber for track work. Both front and rears were leaning harder on the outside edge as evidenced by rubber melting off the edges of the blocks, with more occurring on the outside.

The rear remained very firm, unless provoked...

On the road, the car feels fantastic. I didn't find any problem with reducing toe-in at the front; car remained very stable despite poor UK roads.

Lessons:
- Scuderia settings, particularly -ve camber, are not sufficient for hard track work.
- No negative effects from reducing toe-in at the front.
- Wider fronts (235 are Scud spec) are critical. Pretty sure trev360 recommends 245, so scope to be more aggressive.
- Changing the geo transformed the car on the road.

I will post my geometry sheet too at some point over the weekend. Hope this has been insightful!

Ralph.

 

You'll never get neck snapping results from any Normally aspirated tune in terms of outright performance. Turbo charged is different since you can just turn up the boost so expect huge peak power gains on 488's for example.

...However that being said if you go with sports cats and catless headers you will see big improvement in mid range torque figures, so different points in rev range will feel stronger. Also you'll have faster to respond throttle response (which is tunable).

I also discovered recently that there are some factory defaults which where not calibrated from Bosch base maps on both 430 and 360 cars which mean actual torque requested from the driver via the throttle pedal is gradually fed in over the period of upto a second. This can be adjusted to 200ms or even no delay at all for even snappier throttle and virtually instant torque which you need to be a little careful of as you can more easily break traction if you don't recalibrate yourself to the change.

I'm not seeing tuners do enough on these cars to explore what can be calibrated for enthusiastic driver above and beyond basic fuel and timing maps...

Just recently did an forensic analysis of what Ferrari's factory tuner, Michelotto did on the 360 N-GT and hope to bring some of the learnings from that to some interesting future calibrations... And they will be switchable on the fly...

 

My experience with my Catless headers, a tune and BMC air filters setup yielded a decent increase in performance and a big grin on my mug. Gains: 30WHP 13WTQ. This endorses the fact that Ferrari did not leave any TRQ on the table. An indy also tweaked the shiftting parameters to be much more aggressive and snappier. The results are incredible! Performance increase is felt (at least I felt it) but I wanted to see this translated on the road. A friend owns a 2012 458 and was willing to entertain the idea of a fun-run we did so in a safe, unpopulated area. From a dig, the 458 lunged ahead about half a car length, but after 2-3 seconds my F430 gained 1-2 car lengths and continued to pull gradually. The result was my F430 was ahead of the 458 by about 2-3 car lengths. I hope this sheds some light.
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"Better" is always subjective as we all have different interpretation of better.

Here is my set up and all I can say is I am completely happy as for me it really transformed my car.

Agency Power Headers, Kline Innovation Exhaust, Mase Engineering Software, BMC Racing Filters, Scud Ing Swiss Solid State F1 relay, F1 System Fluid Flush.
I feel the increase in power, torque, better throttle response, exhaust sound is improved and so as gear shifting.

I dont track my F430 Spider so left the alignment setting stock.

 

I've done the exact same trick my 360 against a 458 driver... Shocked was a bit of an understatement, even more so when he realized I was manually shifting a H-gate

Its not all about on paper stats that the cars left the factory like. Think about kerb weight too

 

I'm not sure what you consider full exhaust and "good enough" is very subjective but here's some general comments on a few of the setups i've had:

- Swapping out the H&R springs and fitting the stock springs with scud alignment specs did wonders for the handling on my F430. I have not driven it with stock alignment specs with stock springs so not sure how it compares to that though. Can be a little nervous at times but I'll take it for the increased responsiveness.

- I've tried stock cats, de-cat pipes, and 100 cell cats. I felt like I lost a lot of torque with the de-cat pipes and really had to get on it to get power and that brought along its own circus; I'm pretty sure most people around me thought they had just teleported into the middle of a gran prix race. 100 cell cats brought a good bit of the feeling of lost torque back. I did change to an s-line exhaust when I fitted the de-cat pipes and have heard x-pipes robbing power but can't confirm with any dyno's. To me, headers with the stock exhaust sounds great. I have lots more combos I want to try out exhaust-wise but currently the headers/high-flow cats/s-line is pretty darn good and not lacking for speed or sound.

 

If you didn't get the ECUs calibrated for decat the it won't be operating as programmed. Just doing a post cat O2 disable isn't enough... There are lots of calibrations which go with doing this.

 

Depends on power to weight and driver response not to mention setup

360trevs car........ 1,170kg 427hp : 365 bhp per tonne
Ferrari 458 Italia.. 1,542kg 562hp : 364 bhp per tonne

 

Why would you remove the H&R springs for stock ones?


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I'd love to see the geometry sheet for your car. Do you recommend it for fast road use? I don't track my 430 but anything to sharpen it up even more on road is welcome.

What are the disadvantages of changing the geometry? Just tyre wear?

Do you recommend wider fronts for road use or only track? I may be changing my tyres soon.

Many thanks.

ove to see

 

Did you ever see the geometry spreadsheet i posted?

 

I do have a lot of track experience and will say that regular 430s have a tendency to understeer. This can be improved a lot simply by putting 235s on the front. I once put on a set of Pirelli Corsas (Scud model) which certainly added a lot more grip perhaps most noticeable under braking. Experimenting with alignments could be productive but one must be careful. You could end up with a car that handles better in an absolute sense but becomes so jittery and unpredictable you might be afraid to push it and just end up with faster tire wear. Since I only occasionally track my 430 (I've owned it 13.5 years), I now use Michelin PS4s which are much better IMO than previous iterations.

 

I did a lot of experimentation and in the end I found exactly the same thing with the front end washout, i.e. understeer . It's the biggest problem to overcome to getting a good lap time. It's the whole reason why the 360 N-GT ran wider front fenders so they could run a wider front end track.

On driving feel I really found my preference is to run zero toe at the front end, makes the steering feel more agile. The biggest and easiest setting is to add some shims for much more negative camber and both front and rear. A lot more. And make sure you keep some rake front to rear. Again a lot is described in my spreadsheet calculator.

 

Hi, I think this was aimed at me...

Here is the geometry sheet and yes I highly recommend these settings for fast road use.

You will wear tyres faster with the increased negative camber, but these settings aren't particularly aggressive.

I haven't tried wider fronts so can't answer that question. I personally will be increasing to 235 / 285 widths (Scud widths) when I change tyres.





Front left dying from lack of -ve camber...

 

Hi Trev and Ralph, thank you both. Very interesting. My car is going in for its annual at Macari's next week and I will ask them to adjust the settings. I don't track the car, but I'm keen to maximise its handling on the road. Ralph, you don't find these settings make it too nervous on a typical bumpy tight English B road? I have driven cars which are set up for 'fast roads' German style where they are smooth (like the GT3 RS) and wouldn't want to go that far. Somewhere between stock 430 and Scuderia would be good, I think - even the Scud was a bit too unsettled on some of the roads I drive on (pothole, bump, negative camber, turn getting tighter, tractor appearing the other way, all at the same time - you know the kind of thing).

 

Great thread. The stock F430 is great for road use but can definitely be improved for track performance. Whether this translates to better on the road is subjective. I like the car firmer and with faster turn in but truth is my car gets more use on the track than on the road and so I have tuned it accordingly.

Performance: DMS tune, carbon fibre airboxes, OEM sports exhaust. DMS Dyno says 525bhp but I haven't verified that.
Weight: race seats (-40kg), carbon fibre/ polycarb rear deck (-8kg), carbon fibre diffuser (-7kg), carbon fibre front splitter (-2kg), Li battery (-17kg), OZ Ultraleggera wheels Ti bolts (-20kg), OEM sports exhaust (-8), various trim, bits and bobs (-6kg). Total 100kg.
Handling: 390mm 6 pot AP racing front brakes, braided brake lines, HE ball joints / track rods / tie-ends, Novitec springs (40mm lower), reduced unsprung weight, bigger rear deck nolder, reduced toe, increased camber (-2 all round), Michelin PS4S tyres.

With fluids my car is around 365 bhp/ton and to me the -2 camber front and rear combined with pronounced rake has much improved the balance. Reading this thread I may try 235 up front with the next tyre change to improve low speed turn in. I steered clear of decat headers as they make the car too loud for the noise limits here in the UK (105db). Biggest single improvement - front brake upgrade. CCBs not an option due to replacement costs.


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I enjoy driving on B-roads too and haven't found any downsides to changing to Scud geometry.

The Scud geo is still quite mild; geometry for the track would be zero toe and -ve camber closer to 3 degrees. This may have implications for road driving.

Some other critical points (in my opinion):
1. good make and model of tyres
2. tyres are not too old (very dependant on how the car has been stored, but say 5 years max)
3. pressures I find make a big difference. I stick to 30psi cold (say, 15 celcius)
4. take time to warm the tyres.

Do let us know what spec you go for and how you find it.

 

I agree -- tires probably make the biggest difference if you're pushing hard. I got Trofeo Rs on my scud and increased the front tires to 245. There is a noticeable improvement in turn-in and reduction of understeer. For me, the stickier the better, even if it means having to replace the tires more often.

 

For fast road use I'd agree. Sort out the balance - Scud spec is pretty good (a little lower, little less toe-in, little more camber), then increase grip with stickier tyres (I like the idea of going wider upfront to help with dialling out understeer), then give it a go with TC turned off and see if you still need more power For track use you first go lighter, then see where you are.

 

I use Bridgestone RE71R’s.


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Exactly. Which was why I made the comment about race experience. Turn off all the nannies and then see how they go.


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