I Predicted!!! Manual Conversions < F1

I was a member of the local Porsche Club for years, but this year did not renew. The thing I see differently is the Porsche Crowd are into the most minute details... and cleaning... a Porsche Concours is about excessive cleaning... vs. preservation of originality. I kind of lost my PCA allure when people were telling me that they owned a Concours 2022 Cayman GT4... I was thinking, well, sure its brand new, how could it be anything else?

 

Money and run I fear. its the Stock market Ferrari now.

 

I agree. I took an original 911T with 17k miles to a Bug show and got dinged for not having my value stems alined

 

I know! Took my dad's original one owner 356 B roadster to a show, and my 911 997... and people were on me about gunk build-up along the drivers door jam trim... on a 58 year old car? Nobody really thought much about it only having 40 K original miles.... until finally someone with some Porsche historical knowledge came by and was knocked out by the car. - won a gold medal. That was almost 10 years ago. when they got to my 911... one guy said = why are we even judging this car, its covered in stone chips... ( front and behind the doors do have lots of road rash.. )

 

I have a gated 599 and it drives wonderfully. It's buttery smooth with each shift, so can only imagine your comments are due to having no experience in one with a stick.

 

FCA doesn't judge dirt or stone chips.

 

I bought my 3 pedal 430 new 18+ years ago. When I got in to drive it home, I put it in gear, let out the clutch and stalled it. But I adapted quickly. The small flywheel makes it more difficult than typical manuals but is much more satisfying to master.

But I'm good at manuals. 50 years ago, I drove a cement mixer with dual trannies, two sticks and no synchros. Once adept, I drove it without using the clutch at all except starts and stops.

Dave

 

Too each there own I suppose. For me personally..the Lambo's seriously benefit from the conversion. It truly transforms the car. I have a Murci S.V. booked in for November a conversion. Perfect winter project.

In a car such as the f430..I wouldn't convert it. The f1 system in those, works perfectly IMHO. I suppose an early 360 say 99 until 2001..but after that. It's preference..not performance. The lambos are opposite.

 

Exactly, personal preference. You like it? Great! Are trying to make yourself happy or Joe Budden?

The only objective points of contention is if they will have a negative effect on values and if the conversion itself was done properly.

The latter is cut and dry, it either works smoothly or it doesn’t, on the former, only time will tell.

 

Well..the 3rd Superleggra is on its way up from California for some reason..I guess taking advantage of the dollar difference. I wonder if it's anyone from here..

 

I'm currently writing a book on the subject of software in Ferrari's so I will reveal more in that. As the owner of a small technical consultancy company, an ex-VP of Software Engineering, an ex-Chief Architect and having worked for multiple FTSE 100 companies over the decades I can safely say 'software matters'…

In fact it is now rapidly becoming 1/3rd of the cost of a new car and modern cars can now gross in excess of 100 million lines of source-code – Ask Tesla. Even at the turn of the century cars like the 360 already had millions of lines of code. If you consider that for every 1000 lines of proprietary code (LoC) there is typically one bug you can imagine the software in cars has tens of thousands of bugs. Many never get fixed and most people will never even notice which is why they never get fixed. I'm tell you this so you can understand that this is not fiction, its fact. Certainly many Ferrari's of old (and not just to single out Ferrari, this is a common industry wide problem) when they got launched went out with 'beta' software which has thousands of known bugs in them but unfortunately the commercial reality meant delivery dates mattered more. The biggest mistake was that Bosch never really took ‘in the field’ updates seriously. It just wasn’t seen as commercially interesting for them, and nor for manufacturers either. This old thinking has only recently been demolished with ‘always on’ high speed networks and IoT (Internet Of Things) mindset meaning that everything is updatable.
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Why am I tell you all this? Well it is because actually what many people 'think' they have been driving for all these years (post drive-by-wire adoption, 1999+) is actually a software engineers 'artificial representation' of what a marketing/product strategy team has told them they need to fit into for product headroom or evolution or both. In other words that smoothly linear 'torque' curve of your V8/V12 engine isn't the actual real torque curve of the engine, or moreover it is absolutely not the one that the engine is capable of achieving safely either, or even for emissions reasons. Furthermore the way your throttle pedal is controlled is mostly for reasons that are not even relevant or interesting for keen drivers (emissions, smoothness, noise and vibration, safety, easier driving, etc.). Did you know for example a 575's engine is safely capable of producing 25% more power with NO internal changes and with improved miles per gallon? Wait... what? Well that V12 needed to do duties for many more years to come and many more models so it had to be restricted to leave headroom for more to come.

Let’s take a 360 Modena vs the Challenge Stradale, think it is all the mechanical components and weight loss that Ferrari wrote about in their brochures which make the car drive so differently? Think again, drive one of my 8th generation firmware's and you'll see how even an otherwise stock Modena 'could' have driven if more focus on the software had been done by Bosch and Ferrari. Unfortunately for Ferrari, they produce just too small volumes for someone like Bosch to commercially care about them (except to be able to say we do Ferrari cars) so their factory calibration is not far off 'base map' - just get the thing working status, in other words, only half completed, something a larger OEM would never sign off on. Beggar's cannot be choosers and when you make less than multi-millions of cars per year your firmly in the Beggar's category regardless of your brand image.

I still love the Ferrari engines but the software can be improved on significantly. Think I am exaggerating? How about I tell you that the old 360 variator failure was attributable IMHO to software problems, Wait say what? Ok what about the F430 "Header failure" - Yes another one that's strongly attributed to software (sure, you can fix it by other means but the root cause was bad software). What about cold start misfires which you spend tens of thousands trying to fight, only to find that yet again it can be fixed in software. So to all those people who believe they are worried about software being 'messed around' with, you have nothing to fear from this experienced engineer. I am fixing as many bugs as I find and upgrading cars to the later spec firmware where many bugs have been resolved. Suddenly, your cold start is improved, your warm up cycle is smoother, your idle is better. Da da, software. To keep it relevant to the thread about gated cars, the good old 599 Factory Manual cars. Why does the factory 599 gated car drive so badly? It really does drive horribly but only if you try to drive it slowly, if you drive it aggressively in Race mode it is much better, probably the reason why some people like Brian Crail who have had seat time in them have divulging opinions. Depends on how they are driven!

Why is that? It is because by the time they'd been developing the 599 software they'd forgotten about gated manuals and actually the software had already ‘evolved’ for SO-FAST III. So in a nutshell they’d programmed themselves into a corner, by the time the gated 599 was on the cars they’d somehow forgotten how to ‘undo’ the changes that where done to improve shift speed on an AMT equipped car. After spending months analyzing the software with custom tools I wrote specifically for the job I discovered it was exactly related to this. After doing some alterations to the software I was able to remove the offending AMT code and make it adapt to drive the way a human drives, not a robot. All this talk of lightweight clutches or high revving being the issue is utter tosh. It is entirely a software thing. Think the speed at which your rev’s drop when you rev the engine is mechanical? Think again, the precise speed of the revs dropping is entirely managed in software just like almost every other attribute you think is mechanical. I can confidently say that 599’s which are currently coming out which are gated conversions drive substantially better than any factory car did. Ask any of the new owners and I am yet to meet one that hasn’t fell in love with their car all over again.

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Coming soon

 

Say no more.

 

Getting back to this thread's original post -- that F1 Ferraris converted to gated six operation will someday have resale values lower than their unmolested equivalents -- I say it depends. After following the market in 15-20 year old Ferraris for a couple years I get the sense that sub-10,000 mile examples are a separate market from the higher mileage units. 20 year old cars with 40,000 miles are even referred to as high mileage! (My 20 year old DD -- a Pontiac Vibe -- has 205k!) I agree that the value of a delivery mileage trailer queen is hurt by any modifications. But the buyers of the "high mileage" cars buy them to drive them, not to worry about resale value. This is particularly true for the 612 Scaglietti, which would be an odd choice for a "collector's item" in any condition.

I agree with the posters who write that the 32,000 mile 3-pedal conversion '05 612, that stalled at an RNM bid of $72,500 on Bring a Trailer, suffered from its Rosso Corsa repaint. That's a bad color for this car. But more to the point, no serious financial analyst would argue that one buy/sell transaction sets an entire market, even a relatively inefficient market like the one for 18 year old Ferrari 2+2s. For that reason I assume the OP started this thread with tongue firmly in cheek.

On the other hand, it is always the case that a seller of a modified car has eliminated from the buyer pool all showroom stock shoppers. This is necessarily a headwind to resale value. To match or exceed the market rate of unmolested cars, the seller of a modified car must always find a buyer who shares the seller's idiosyncratic tastes. Conversely, the main reason for the market stability of unmolested cars is that they're substantially interchangeable: that the buyer has a good idea of what he/she is buying. Also, market value at resale time is reasonably predictable, another plus for the buyer.

I think the reason that many Detroit restomods have become six figure cars is that they too have become interchangeable, at least to the extent that buyers have a good idea of what they're buying, and can compare apples to apples when choosing between different cars. If this is true, then my crystal ball says the same thing will happen with converted F1 Ferraris (and E-Gear Lambos and Speedshift Astons). As converted F1s become more common in the marketplace they will become more accepted and, yes, more highly valued than their showroom stock equivalents.

And by the way, to @360trev: didn't you post recently in the 599/612 forum that you've perfected the F1 software to the point that some owners might like the F1 so much they'd find it unnecessary to convert to a gated six? If your mod becomes widely adopted this could be another headwind to the value of the converted cars.

 

I want people to enjoy their car whatever they choose personally, be it AMT or gated. As such I have improved shifting capabilities and speed of shift on the AMT on the 599 and yes it really improve it significantly, even without touching the TCU itself. I have also fixed issues and improve shift for 6-speed gated cars too (turning off the throttle lockout so you can actually heel & toe for gate cars and improving the rev match delay, etc. for different driving modes. actually adding driving modes on earlier cars like the 575M which never had such features for example).

I think there are actually a couple of things which could dramatically change perspectives (and $$$) here.
1. Gated may be forced upon cars due to lack of availability of spare parts and NLA essential parts to fix the AMT cars, what do you do wait around for used spares to come up or get the car running by converting it?
2. If they start to break down regularly this could force already converted car prices higher.

 

The nice thing about the lambo..none of that is required. A coding flip of the dash board from e-gear to manual..texa does this nicely. Leave the e-gear ecu in place to keep ABS happy..bypass the start relay, and it's done.

 

I'm talking about different things in my previous post. The dash cluster can also be coded on some Ferrari's via KWP2000 (Keyword Protocol 2000) but that doesn't fix any of the issues with the firmware. It still needs to be re-flashed. They didn't evolve to a 'body computer' till post F430, even the 430 Scuderia didn't get Fiat's Floriana architecture, i.e. separate body ecu and proxi-alignment coding.

 

I think it very simple. As long as factory 430 manuals retain value, converted cars will always trade a premium to the f1. Maybe by a small margin, maybe by a big one. Time will tell. 430 Converted cars will never trade at factory prices. Dont think anyone has ever suggested they wld.

 

IMHO..any EVO8 F430 conversion would completely destroy the value of the car..especially the Scud. Even if you had a catastrophic failure of the F1 system..it would still be better to repair it than convert it. Those final years of the 430 were indeed the best of the run.

 

I think many of us worry to much about residuals and then don't enjoy the cars as we should. I've never once decided not to drive my cars because it may use too many miles. Screw it!

As for the 430 Scuderia that was probably the best car converted to gated I've ever experienced, it was probably the best gated box shift feel i had ever tried on any Ferrari, period. Such a shame they didn't use those parts in the stock gearbox as the shifting action and silkiness of the change is so much better feeling. Judging from this experience I don't think the 5 or 6 gated Scud owners around the world have anything to worry about. Not only are they so 'unicorn' rare they do actually drive super amazingly, not to take anything away from the final SOFAST incarnation but that box as a gated is almost a religious experience. I would own one in a heartbeat. If I ever buy a Scud I'm doing this regardless of the value. To hell with it, just keep all the old parts, it can always be retrofitted if you ever wanted to sell it...

 

Powerful words, of all the gin joints in the world, the one I like most of all is a Scud. I was never brave enough enough, but I've been told you can turn in on full throttle and somehow survive.

 

IMHO it's Ferrari's best car to date. Close behind is the 458 Speaciale..but it comes in second place behind the Scud..

 

Not totally, but I wouldn’t buy a converted F430. Of course I’m only one data point.


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I get the enthusiasm for gated shifters, but why not just buy one of the thousands of Ferraris equipped with a gated shifter? Anyone who asked about installing a DCT in a Testarossa would get blank stares, at best. The reverse seems equally odd.


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Remember this is still a manual gearbox, its not a DCT. The Scuderia box is still a manual box with a hydraulic selector fork on the side rather than a manual one, so really its just a refinement of the original manual gearbox. Nothing more.

Furthermore it is not even an enthusiasm for gated 'per se' here that i am calling out, its that those gearbox parts genuinely make a huge difference. Those upgraded parts (internally revised) which work so well on the SOFAST-III equipped Scuderia are so instantly recognizable as as 'great' when you shift yourself. So much so that its highly noticeable after just a few gear changes ( it improves upon the overall experience of manual shifting ). Therefore the experience of a gated Scuderia is instantly recognizable as something special indeed. What makes that gearbox so good in F1 guise also makes it work equally well with a human rowing and not solenoids and hydraulics doing it on your behalf. Therefore the idea of 'just buying any other of the thousands of gated cars' still won't get you there. Indeed I myself have a factory manual gated 360 which I've owned for the past 20+ years and the shifter (while working properly) isn't anywhere near as nice. Its that simple.

 

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