Is the Salvage Auction Ferrari's Engine Bad I Started Taking it Apart and Found Multiple Issues!

Is my Ferrari's engine bad? This is the question I'm stuck on after performing a ton of trial and diagnosis and still experiencing continual misfires. To recap, I've installed new spark plugs, swapped coil packs, tested wires, tested fuel pressure, swapped mass airflow sensors, did a simple vacuum test, did a more involved vacuum test that was kind of bootleg using a cigar, a hand pump, some plugs from the hardware store, and well my misfires still remain. On top of all that, the engine bay now reeks of cherry flavored black and milds. The comments section has been very constructive with a lot of people wanting me to test and inspect my fuel injectors. I pulled the fuel rails, which came out with just a couple screws in each rail, and swapped the injectors in the same fashion as I did coil packs, and the codes still appear on cylinders 2 and 5, so our injectors are likely fine. The obvious move at this point is to do a compression test, something that is almost horrifying on a Ferrari, but is long overdue on mine. I actually bought a compression tester at the auto parts store during one of my usual runs, but it didn't come with the appropriate connection for a Ferrari. This gave me a little bit of time to stall while I perform other smaller, easier tests to try and nail down my problem, but at this point, there's not much left to do. Searching YouTube, I found an incredible DIY Ferrari channel called Radarosa, containing a ton of videos about DIY Ferrari maintenance, and a bunch specifically about the Ferrari 360. I messaged Mr. Radarosa, and here's the response I received. Hey Sam, Scott from Radarosa here. Heard you had a bit of a tricky situation with your Ferrari 360, and having a hard time trying to diagnose it, so I thought I would extend a helping hand. As you can see, I have a little bit of experience with my own collection of Prancing Horses that I've maintained for the past 20 years. A few different flavours in my garage. We have got the Rat Rod Testarossa Spider back there, that's pretty unique. We've got my current Gamble, this $19,000 beautiful 456, which was a non-runner. We're fixing that up, and we're filming with that one at the moment, but more specific to you, we have my Ferrari 360 Challenge Fridali that I've daily driven for the past 10 years, and encountered probably all of the common problems on a 360, and Sam, some of those are quite difficult to try and diagnose. So let me try and help you out, and give you a few suggestions. One thing you can check is the condition of your catalytic converters. This is an old one out of my car. What you need to do is unscrew your O2 sensors, check the condition of those, then take your endoscope, have a fish around inside that hole, have a good look, and make sure your cats haven't started to break down. The other common issue with the cat system on the Ferrari 360 are these things. This is a cat ECU, there's one either side of the engine. Now the cool thing is, they are interchangeable. It'll take you a couple of minutes, so switch those over and make sure your fault doesn't change. You've also overfilled the engine with oil. Don't worry, that is a common thing for people to do with a Ferrari dry sump engine. I myself am guilty of doing it in the past, so I know what it takes to clean up that spill inside, and unfortunately it means you are going to have to remove the manifold from the car. Now do that, replace the cheap gaskets at the same time, which are known to crack and cause problems. Now the unfortunate thing you've got Sam, is a spider, and I have a horrible feeling you are going to have to remove that convertible roof system in order to get the manifold out of the car. So good luck with that, but Sam first, come on, out of everything else you're doing here, just do that compression test. Get it over and done with, because the suspense is killing us all. And look, I think your car sounded pretty strong at the beginning in those first videos, so I'm sure you're going to be okay. Worst case scenario, there's always a plan B, as there was with the Rata Rossa when I built that. We had some fun with it, you could just rip that engine out, install a pizza oven, and have the most coolest Italian kitchen accessory known to man. Good luck my friend, hope it all goes well, ciao for now. Now taking Scott's advice, I cleared all my codes, I quickly swapped both cat ECUs, very simple couple minutes, started the car, and the misfire codes remained the same. I then went and used this really cool $20 scope camera that linked directly to my phone. Even though it's dark in the pipes I was fishing in there where the O2 sensors go, the camera has a bunch of little LEDs at the end, so I could clearly see my cat, which was in excellent condition. For all those wondering which camera I bought, I'll throw a link down in the description box. At this point, I'm ready to start the intake manifold disassembly, but since this will be challenging and quite time consuming, I must do a compression test. For all the subscribers out there, cross your fingers for me. If you're not a subscriber, consider hitting that button. And for all the Ferrari chat members, now's a good time to get out your voodoo dolls. Cylinder number one, all right, not bad, about 175. And this is cylinder number two. Okay, so right there we've got about 170-ish. Cylinder three, 180. Cylinder four, 195. Okay, we're now on the second bank, this is cylinder five, 180. Cylinder six, 180. Almost done now, cylinder number seven. Not only did we get 190, we also did not do any severe damage to the brand new GoPro or the new gauge set. Last one, cylinder number eight, 190 again. We're going to attempt to take the intake manifold out of the car, that way I can clean all the oil out, change all the gaskets, and eliminate one more failure point that might be causing our misfires. Now, this is going to be interesting because on the Spyder version, a lot of people say you have to take the convertible top off to get the intake manifold off the car, and that's just because of clearance issues back here. However, I think if we access some fasteners, some hoses from the inside of the car, and we are able to slide this up after unbolting everything, we might be able to get it out. Those are the nuts that are holding on the intake manifold. We're going to have to wiggle in with whatever they call that. Stuck on there, nice and stripped. We'll get a new one. We're just making sure that I did not drop a nut down one of the spark plug holes. I don't think it went down there, but there are spark plugs in those holes. Even if we did, all I see down there is a spark plug. Right there is a good look of what we're unscrewing back behind. Here's the one that was hidden. You see the stud? It's got no nut on it, so we are good to go. This side is pretty much detached. Now, we got to go on that side. Check this out. That's what we're trying to get out is just that one last screw is the only last screw holding the intake manifold in. This is what we were trying to get in there with. This is a ratcheting wrench, and this is an awesome tool, by the way. It's got four different sizes on it, but you can see how thick that end is. I went just now and picked this up at the auto parts store. This is a lot thinner. It should let us get in there and get that last nut out. Hopefully, we can take that intake manifold off. Well, our new ratcheting wrench just didn't do the trick. At this point, I'm loosening up the tensioner up front. There's a tensioner on the underside, so we're going to jack up the car in a second. Once we get this drive belt off right here, which is actually in pretty good shape, I'm surprised, we are going to be able to pull it off. Give us a tiny bit more clearance to get in there and hopefully remove that nut. If that doesn't work, well, then the timing covers are coming off well. That's not a bad thing because we'll be able to check out the condition of the timing belt. All right, check it out. The last bolt is out and look how loose our intake manifold is out. We've got a couple hoses holding it on. I think if I'm able to just shimmy it forward a little bit, we'll be able to disconnect those and it'll come out. They're so close. There's just all these freaking wires all attached to the bottom. There's one hose keeping me from just yanks the entire thing off and that is the hose with the silver clamp directly in front of us. You see right there. Now, if you look, that hose is not consistent with all the other hoses in this car. We can easily see that hose right in this cluster of hoses right here. It's the fresher looking one in the back here, the one that you can hardly see and that's because someone already replaced this hose. There's a lot of one-time use clamps in this car and those obviously came from Ferrari. Well, if you look on this hose, there's one of those right there, just one of those twist clamps, which I actually prefer those while you can reuse them and they're way easier to get to than those one-time use clamps, which tells me someone just cut this line when they were already in here once doing whatever job they were doing and they replaced this with just a generic auto parts store hose, which is no big deal because it connects just right in front of the alternator. You can hardly see it down there. I think that that's the smart idea. It's just to go ahead, cut this hose, and then we can pull our intake manifold off. All right, this might be it. Let's see if this comes loose and it does. There we go. Now, we can see what the inside of our intake manifold looks like and, oh yeah, we got pools of oil everywhere. That could easily be why our car is continually misfiring. Now, let's see if I can just lift this entire manifold out at this point. Definitely a lot more room. Now, just upon very quick inspection here in the engine bay, there's these little gaskets that sit in between the intake manifold and the heads here. You can see a couple of them stuck on the side of the intake manifold, but the ones that are here, look how chewed up that is. Here's another one on the other side. This could easily be because I was shimmying it around while I was pulling it off, but these appear to be the original ones. When I touch this one right here, this is cylinder five, one of our misfire cylinders, it is wet. It's got oil on it. So, I'm thinking that our pools of oil in the intake manifold and these gaskets, they just all need to be redone. One other thing I'm noticing is right here, this valve cover is really nice and dirty. This one over here is fairly clean. That likely means we've got a valve cover gasket leak. So, while we're in here, we might as well just go and replace both side valve cover gaskets so that they last another, I don't know, several years. I already ordered our intake manifold gasket replacements from Recambi. This is what the brand new one looks like. This is what the old ones look like that just, again, they fell apart when I took them out. I want to give a big thanks to Recambi because I got a really nice surprise. I just opened the box. They threw in this nice little box of cookies, which I could really use after spending over an hour fishing out one screw in this engine bay. Here's a closer look at our intake manifold. Remember, I had siphoned out the oil, what I thought was most of the oil, and I used a ton of shop rags in this thing. And there are pools of oil basically anywhere it can collect. So, imagine at higher RPMs, while this is shaking up on top of the engine and it's sucking in more air than usual, it could easily be throwing some of this into the cylinder, causing it to put out the spark, causing our misfire. And while I'm not guaranteeing this is the culprit, it definitely needs to be removed and cleaned to eliminate one other possibility. So, I have all the intake manifold gaskets here and ready to go, but I did not really anticipate that valve cover leak. So, I've ordered those gaskets. They should be here in only a day or two, and the second they show up, I'm getting right back to work assembling this engine bay. As you saw, that mess of wiring harness that runs underneath the intake manifold there, every hour I wait is every hour I forget how that all went back together. There's wires that are routed on either side, and they run underneath and up and over the intake manifold. I just really have never seen anything like this. It was pretty challenging, and everything you saw as far as the intake manifold removal process today took about a day and a half worth of labor. We put in a solid eight hours the first day, about four or five hours the second day. So, it was not a quick job in putting everything back together. I'm going to do it very slow and methodically, because if I forget one wiring harness under there, well, you know what's got to happen. Now, I want to give a huge thanks to Scott, aka Radarosa, for navigating me around the engine bay of this car somewhere he's very familiar with, and I encourage you to check out his channel because it's really cool. I'll link it down in the description box below. Also, when I get this all put back together, I'll, of course, be uploading an Instagram story, likely showing the car running. That is if it does run when I'm done with this, and if you haven't already followed me on Instagram, you can go right here. Just click the link in the description box below. I'll also be posting our new rebuild project there before it goes live here on YouTube, and I want to give a huge thanks to each and every one of you for watching today. I'll catch you very soon.