Ferraris and fires, question...

A 430!

Gee now thats trouble brewing.

By the time the 355s had been on the road a month we had already replaced a train car load of cat temp ECUs for false signals.


One 430 has a cracked manifold (reportedly, I used to be a shop foreman so I learned to not believe any diagnosis until the fix had been done and the problem was proved gone) and a panic starts.

 

My slow down light came on also. It was the ECU. The cats were fine. I replaced both ECU's. Only had 4,000 miles on it then. Now have 8K miles and no problems with the cat over temp warning system.

There was an interesting issue with the replacement ECU's. Found two different prices for the white units. One was $280.00 each. The other was $1,800 each. Both did the exact same job. Only difference was the wire plug end on the new unit. I transfered the wire plug end from the old unit to the new updated unit. Installed it. It is a perfect direct replacement!

Greg

 

Which ones did you use? Where did you find them?

 

Some time ago, my 88.5 TR had a full-blown cat fire that took out the exhaust, bumper, and a good portion of the engine components. Ultimate cause was a broken fuel-pressure regulator in the K-jetronic injection. The TRs are basically two separate 6-cylinder engines sharing a common crankshaft. One of the fuel pressure regulators failed (specifically, one of the ceramic disks cracked inside the housing), and this allowed full-pressure fuel to inject into the right side cylinder bank (recall, K-jetronic varied the injection quantity by regulating the pressure to the injectors; not by the now-universal use of pulsed injectors varying the duty cycle).

On any normal car, this would shut down the engine as the fuel would not combust under these excessively rich conditions. On the TR, however, the other half of the engine had no idea what had happened and merrily went on working, turning the non-working half into a crude pump filling the cats and exhaust with unburnt fuel. This eventually collected in sufficient quantity to overheat the cats, then the exhaust, and then start various plastic bits in the bumper cover and engine bay burning. Total process required about 25 minutes of cruising on open highway at slow speed (speed limit, 55 mph).

During this, I was oblivious to any impending problem. The engine was sluggish and down on power, but not enough for me to seriously question what was going on. I first noticed a problem when I went to hit the clutch to downshift for an exit ramp, and the pedal fell to the floor (clutch fluid had boiled in the slave cylinder).

Strange, I thought, what could cause that while driving. I looked in the rear-view mirror, and flames were leaking out from the engine bonnet. I pulled over, poped the bonnet, and started fighting the fire by waving my coat jacket against the flames. This was dumb, as I inhaled enough of my Ferrari to end up in the emergency room. And I ruined my favorite suit jacket. No extinguisher during this, another hard lesson learned.

Fortunately, I had pulled over next to a hose and faucet, that we found after a few minutes and managed to get the fire out before it consumed the engine bay. I was on such an adrenalin rush, I had no idea the damage I had done to my lungs until about 5 minutes after the fire was out. I started coughing uncontrollably, and quickly decided I should head to the emergency room, driven by a friend who had stopped by (this happened in 1999, before cell phones were common enough to summon emergency response in the middle of nowhere).

Car eventually went to Dave Helms (when he was at Ferrari of Denver; who found the root cause) and was nicely fixed up by Dave and crew. Dave no-doubt remembers the car.

2 lessons learned from this:

1) Don't try to fight your car fire beyond an obvious, small flame. In hindsight, I was seconds away from MAJOR lung damage and didn't even know it. Burning cars have lots of toxins and other nasty stuff you shouldn't breathe. Carry a Halon extinguisher, use it on a small fire, if that doesn't work, stand back, call the professionals, and pray.

2) Pay attention to the small details and track down the cause. Cat fires are real, and can be caused by any number of problems. Slow-down lights are not to be ignored on the Italian exotics. I had a similiar problem (unburnt fuel into the cats) of both my Diablos, traced down to intermittant ignition (I had dropped a cylinder on the 6.0; rusted plug due to faulty plug boot seals).

Godspeed, and the TR fire was covered by my insurance to the tune of about $40k.