Cost of maintaining a modern Ferrari - 986 Forum - The Community for Porsche Boxster & Cayman Owners

YellowPorscheMan2002 · 12-28-2006, 12:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Perfectlap

from the reading their forum they seem to be of the opine that there is a BIG leap in reliability from the 348/355 to the 360/430. Night and day it seems.

I can't help but think about how this falls in line with the results from their racing programs.

in the mid 90's when the 348's and 355 were sold, Ferrari racing really was nowhere. Both F1 and sports cars. As we crossed over to the new milenium when the 360's and now 430's were up for sale the motorsports division began dumping unprecedented levels of spending en route to winning all these titles in F1 and this year the 430's were the class of the field in sports cars, well at least sprint races. FIA GT is going to an all sprint race schedule next year with the exception of LeMans so it will be interesting in Porsche vs. Ferrari.
Porsche still have a big advantage in endurance racing due to bullet proof racing engines in races lasting more than two hours.

anyhoo it sounds like going with the mid 90's 355 will cost you allot more money to maintain than a second hand 360. The 430 is still outrageously expensive to get into.

You make an interesting point by aligning Ferrari's more recent success in racing programs with the more reasonable maintenance and reliability of newer models, 360 Modena and beyond. I have a friend at work who knows allot more about cars than I do, that said something very similar. He pointed out that, " It's only been very recently that Ferarri got their act together again." He was pointing to the Formula 1 success with Schumacher, of course, and the fact that only the newer Ferrari's give you supercar performance with the supercar price (My example again of the Testarossa comes to mind, as does the example of the Tom Selleck 308 that does 0-60 in like 7 seconds; that's a true piece of garbage in my opinion.

That being said, this gentleman is such a car nut that his stock E55 AMG wasn't fast enough, so he did a chip, an exhaust, and some other mods that cost him 10's of thousans and pushed the car over 600 HP.