Building a 348 Le Mans Race car for the road

Now that the work has started, I thought it better to create a fresh thread and to post all work done on here. The thread will be copied over to Club Scud and Pistonheads where many people are following the existing threads and keep asking me how things are progressing. So apologies if you see them there.

If anyone has any questions, please feel free to post up and I'll try and answer it or pass it onto Raj who is doing the work.

I'll try and be as truthful as to what happens as I can, so if the engine does end up blowing apart please be sympathetic.



For those who don't know what has happened so far, here's a brief summary.

My old mate Adam (Hazy) came across a 348 race engine at Simpson Motorsport (www.simpsonmotorsport.co.uk) and told me about it. It was used in the 348 that Simpson raced at the Le Mans 24 hour in 1993 and 1994. Simpson are a well know race team who have a few race wins at Le Mans

The engine spec is:

Ted Wenz crank, Cosworth Spec Pistons, Cams and Valve Springs. Large valves. Individual throttle butterflies. Titanium rods. Ported and polished heads. . Freshly rebuilt, no miles. 480bhp and revs to 9400rpm.

The engine is 1 of 6 in the world is is a hybrid engine from Ferrari comprising of a 355 block and 348 heads.

After much persuasion from another good friend Chaz (Chaa) I decided to buy the engine. The plan was to do a straight swap with the existing engine in the my 348. You may recall that around 2 years ago, another friend George (Gee355) and I did an engine out cambelt change on the car. That was the first time I was ever involved in doing any work on my 348 let alone a car.

However, I then met Raj from Adesso Performance (www.adessoperformance.co.uk) who specialises in Ferrari's, Lambo's, Porsches etc. I was very impressed with his knowledge and more importnatly he was as crazy as I was and came up with some great ideas for the Le mans engine. So he'll be the one who's doing the bulk of the work.

We plan to do the following over the next month.

* Take apart, clean and rebuild parts of the engine
* Replace the existing engine electrical components
* Replace the ECU with a Motec M800
* Remove the existing engine from the 348 and replace it with the Le Mans engine
* Fabricate a custom airbox for the engine
* Replace the standard 348 suspension with one from Quantum Racing www.quantumracing.co.uk
* Have the engine mapped with 4 settings
* Have the suspension aligned
* Plus other things that I can't remember

The two questions I get asked the most is how much will it cost and why don't you get a 355/360/430/gallardo etc.

Firstly, whilst not going into too much details, it would probably cost me as much as a used 348/355. Secondly, my 348 will hopefully be more powerful than a 355/360/430, plus the engine is a piece of history. How amny times have you seen a Ferrari Le Mans race engine in a street car.

Pics of the engine........
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Day 1

Technically it's day 2, but I don't really want to count the day we took it out of the box as day 1.

Spent the afternoon today removing components from the engine.

We're going to have some items powder coated and others zinc coated. Going for the mettalic blue, silver, mettalic red & gold look.

The engine looks clean in the pictures due to the flash, but needs a good scrub.

Cam covers off.
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Fuel rails removed

(I'm assuming they are called fuel rails )
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Here's something very interesting and something I've never come across.

This is the fuel injector that Raj is holding. We checked the part number and it's the same standard part on my existing 348 engine. I was expecting it to be a more "race specced" item.

The little red part is the filter which can often get blocked. We'll be sending the injectors off for testing and refurbishing, once we ascertain the cost of new ones as it may be cheaper just to buy new ones.
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I checked the injector part number and it's a stock 348 item. Not sure if it has been modified.

We'll be sending it off for testing and refurbishing.

Are there any other injectors we could use?
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Top part of the engine stripped
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As previously said, the engine was rebuilt 2 years ago and not driven since.

The valves are brand new without a single mark on them.

Once we get the engine timing figures, Raj will be taking the belt and other bits off and re-checking the timing. We'll be taking pictures of the process and may even do a video of it being done.
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The eagle eyed amongst you may have noticed something about the cambelt.

Well.. it's not a Ferari cambelt. Seemed that the 348 belt I sent to them didn't fit, so they used one for anm Alfa Romeo that does fit.

If you look at the pulleys you'll understand why. They aren't standard pulleys.
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The engine did come with a set of cambelt covers. Unforunatly a pair of the back bits are missing so will have to use them from the old engine.
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However, they will be a bloody hard thing to fit due to that cross bar on the two lower pulleys!!!

The waterpump is a new one from Eurospares. www.eurospares.co.uk

They now do copy 348 water pumps that are around a quarter of the price of new ones. Maranello was asking around £1,000 for 1 waterpump!!!
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Here's something else I found quite interesting.

Raj does a lot of repairs on Lamborghini's, especially Murcielago's. He had a black one in last week that had already been to two other specialists in order to fix an engine problem. The owner had spent close to £8,000 getting it repaired, without success. As Raj is a diagnostic specialist, he found the problem fairly easily in this instance.

Turned out the problem had been the spark plugs.

The picture below shows what happens when you install a spark plug with the wrong heat setting. Instead of using a heat setting of 9, someone had put in plugs with a setting of only 7, which meant the tips melted.

The one on the right has the melted tip.
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This leads me into the spark plugs for the Le Mans engine.

A Murcielago requires a heat setting of 9 (higher it is the more heat it can handle), whilst the Champion race plugs one the LM engine are 11. Plus they don't make the Challenge plugs anymore.

However, we won't be using race plugs as they will cause fouling on road driving so we may end up using a set of special Lambo plugs instead.

That's all for now. We start work again on it next weekend.

Thanks for reading.