What kind of oil are you using?

Well, that's disappointing considering the original prices.

 

Keep in mind that I'm just giving an opinion based on their specs and relating them to "normal" cars of the time and on my experience with building competition/performance US V8s. It is not based any on actual experience working with Ferrari motors and actually checking various clearances/blueprinting them. I have a lot of actual experience with US muscle car motors in that regard but none with Ferraris. The Mopar 426 Hemi was said to be in spec if it did not burn more than a quart of oil in 600 miles - about the same as the 3x8. But the Mopar was more than twice the size in swept area and it was of much older technology on top of that.


As an example of production tolerances with a US motor...
We dynoed new Hemis back in the day and saw as low as 420 HP and as high as 510 on identical stock Hemi motors. They usually ran around 44o-450 on the dyno. Bu it's all about how the tolerances line up on each individual engine. It also explains why you can have two "identical" engines and one likes the base timing at 6 degrees of advance while the one next to it likes 14 degrees. There is really no such thing as two identical production engines. THe guys/gals assembling them just pick up parts and install them. If the parts and engine block that came to hand on that engine just all happened to fall to the outside of the spec, you got a crappy engine like that 420HP hemi; if the Gods were smiling on parts, you got the 510 HP version! Blueprinting, of course, gets rid of those factory tolerance variations.