488 Exhaust soot on wall

Mine does the same , it’s part of the charm. I stopped backing my car in. Problem solved. Best, Kirk.

 

My 2018 488 exhaust does the same thing on cold start. I use a large cardboard "blast shield" to capture the soot and condensate. As far as the rear window fogging up on cold start, mine does that as well. I don't know the source, but it clears in a couple of minutes so NBD.

 

All cars do this to some degree. My Porsche is the worst. I would recommend putting a large cardboard box against the wall behind your parking spot if you don’t want to blacken the wall. It is actually quite difficult to clean.

 

Yeah, no worries about the car, the wall is another matter. Like Kirk said, don't back in and problem solved.

 

Normal. I park nose in and open the sliding doors before I start the car

 

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Just call it “street art”. Best , Kirk.

 

Mine (my 488) never did that.. in fact, the exhaust was so clean, I used to joke with friends that you could breath the exhaust coming out of the 458 and the 488.

With that said, I broke my 488 in with 5 or 6 hard 1/4 mile runs, red-line shifting, rolling starts when it had about 150 miles on it. But I like to break the motors in kinda hard. All the motors I've ever built where I babied them or took it easy initially, every one smoked and/or burned oil. The ones I broke in right away at Redline always ran great. Hard to say if that has anything to do with it, but I, myself, never went in for all the crap about "drive it under 4000 RPM's for the first 5 trillion miles"

Ray

 

my f430 spider and 458 loves doing that, very typical for ferraris within my limited ownership experience. I dont see this from my porsches or audi though, i assume it's an italian only charm lol

 

Which brand of gas do you use and which octane? I only ever use Chevron 91 octane. I wonder if you switch brands if that might make a difference. Also, I'd try disconnecting the battery and going through the start up sequence in the manual. It could be something out of whack. I'll give you an example, my neighbor has a 360 and one of his windows wasn't going back up correctly. He was trying all sorts of things with no luck. I told him I had the same issue and fixed it by disconnecting the battery and recycling the windows full up and down. He did that and it cured the issue. On my 458, one day the exhaust valve started working opposite to how it should. It was staying open in sport mode and shutting in race. I reset the car by disconnecting the battery and it went back to working correctly.

The ECU learns its air/fuel ratio and constantly makes adjustments. Resetting it back to square one can some times help.

Also, are you running any sort of high flow cats or after market exhaust and/or do you have the exhaust valves locked open or anything?

Another thing is the O2 sensors could be going bad or giving off an incorrect reading. I don't know if Ferraris use a narrow band or wide band O2 sensor, but it might be worth looking into. Most cars use what is known as a narrow band O2 sensor. It helps the car maintain the proper Stoichiometric air/fuel ratio for effiecent combustion. Under ideal circumstances you want a Lambda of 1.0 (or in terms of air fuel ratio for gas, it's 14.7 - 14.7 parts air to 1 part gasoline). Anyway, to maintain this ratio, the car is constantly getting feedback from the O2 sensor... you can think of it like the car is asking the O2 sensor "hey, how are we doing back there with the exhaust?" Unfortunately, a narrow band O2 sensor can only reply sort of like, "more to the left" or "more to the right" or "okay, that's prefect". It can't tell the car's ECU exactly how far off base the air/fuel ratio is - it can only say you need to go more this direction or the other.

Okay, now, with a wide band O2 sensor - and again, I don't know if Ferrari uses narrow or wide band - a wide band sensor can give an exact reading, then the car's computer can know if it needs to make larger or smaller adjustments to the amount of fuel being delivered. This is why you see serious tuners running wide band air fuel ratio gauges on their cars; it allows them to closely monitor how the fuel mixture is doing. This is also what smog stations check. If you look at the read out from your last smog inspection, it will probably show the air/fuel ratio on there. A wide band O2 sensor will tell the car the exact air fuel ratio it's seeing or tenhcially the lambda and then the ECU works on the ratio.

My point is that if you have an O2 sensor going bad - and/or the ECU is out of whack - you might have a motor which is unable to maintain the corrrect air/fuel ratio and this can produce soot from the exhaust. An easy check is seeing what your gas mileage is. Fill up the tank full, mark down the mileage, drive and record the number of miles driven, then fill the tank back up; now you know total miles and total gallons used. Divide miles by gallons and that will give MPG. If your mileage is really poor, it might indicate that an O2 sensor is constantly telling the ECU "hey, add more gas; our air fuel ratio isn't looking correct back here!" This can cause the car to run rich in an effort to constantly trim out the motor to the correct air fuel ratio (AFR) and result in a rich condition that not only negatively impacts your gas mileage, but also produces sooty exhaust.

You could also pay a smog station to check your air fuel ratio. You could also buy an OBD2 code reader that supports live data. It might show the O2 data and/or the AFR the ECU is seeing in real time. You could also install your own wide band O2 sensor into the exhaust system - sometimes you can even supply that data to the car's ECU if it has provisions to monitor it via an extra harness or sub ECU. It's really not a bad idea in my opinion. I mean, even on the little 1990 Toyota pickup truck that I'm working on right now, I'm planning to build my own SS exhaust for it and weld in a bung for a wide band O2 sensor and gauge. AEM makes a really nice one, which uses the Bosch wide band sensor.

Anyway, that might be something to look into further, since faulty O2 sensor data might be the culprit. You could also visit the dealer and have them check, but I think I'd try using an OBD2 code reader myself first.

Ray

 

Personally, I don't use shell gas if I can avoid it.

Run out the current gas and then try switching to Chevron and reset the ECU by disconneting the battery. Follow the reconnect procedure in the owner's manual.

Also, are you driving the car all around in auto mode or are you actually driving it like a man?

Ray

 

You could also have a faulty fuel injector lurking around. That can sometimes cause soot on start up. I'd reset the ECU, switch to using Chevron and ask the dealer to run a diagnostic on the car and verify that the O2 sensors are working ok.

Trust no one... especially not Shell Oil haha

Ray

 

Normal -- Any failure on this car would throw a light.

 

Just to elaborate on the comment above (where I mentioned a faulty fuel injector(s) could cause the issue): if the injectors are bad from the factory and leak after you shut the engine down, it wouldn't be readily apparent. There would be no code or anything abnormal. However, the residual pressure in the fuel rails could cause the injector to leak just a touch after shutting the car down and this overly rich amount of gas sitting around could cause the soot on start up.

It's a long shot, but it's possible.

Again, I would change to Chevron gas, reset the ECU and see if it goes away. If not, have the dealer check it out.

Ray

 

Blast shield in use here, too. Huge blast shield.

 

Every Autumn, at the end of the F season, add just a swipe of new paint

 

Mine only started blowing out soots during cold start ups after I pinned my vacuum lines to keep the valves always open. Not sure if this is the cause though.

 

I'm no exhaust expert but if our car really produces soot, won't it be better for it to be blown out rather than accumulate or get stuck somewhere in the exhaust system? If so, then this would be another reason to pin the valves open.

 

Just chiming in with my similar experience. I installed a Novitec valveless exhaust upon delivery of my 2019 488 GTB back in August and it has been leaving two black soot patches on the wall since the first week it has been in my possession. The lack of valves/flaps seems to be a logical explanation.

Not a big deal on the concrete wall of my temporary apartment garage...but I’m a little worried about the white cabinets going up on the back wall of the garage in my new house! I too will need to devise some sort of blast shield....


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