July 2003
July 2003
Hello, All-
This missive is intended to introduce me and my Ferrari to the group on Tom Yang’s Vintage Ferrari site. This may be rather long; Tom, of course, may edit it down. If it’s still too long for you, you can—through the miracle of the internet—just hit the back button...
My name is Michael McClure. I’ve been lurking for close to two years. Thank you, Tom, for your efforts, and the rest of you for your contributions. I have learned a lot.
I’m an auto mechanic and sports car enthusiast, and I’ve always wanted a V-12 Ferrari. Not being able to afford one, I drove Alfas. From the age of 17 on, I had quite a few of them, and raced an SCCA F-Prod 1300 Spider Veloce from 1978 to 1987. I always considered a Giulietta to be 1/3 of a Ferrari. But still...
My favorite Ferrari since I was a kid was a 330GTC. OK, I was 12 years old when it came out. I devoured everything I could get my hands on about it and all Ferraris. My older brother wanted a Lusso, but the GTC was my Holy Grail. Sure, as I got older, I lusted for a 250GTO or a Testa Rossa, but even then they were astronomical. Plus, Phil Hill was quoted as saying the 330GTC was the best all-around Ferrari ever.
The 330GTC was made just before emissions and crash regulations started playing havoc with cars in general, and high performance cars in particular. I like that it has the classic Ferrari V-12 engine, 4-wheel independent suspension, a 5-speed transaxle, 4 wheel disc brakes, and carburetors. I even like the power windows and air conditioning.
In January 2002, I decided to do it—to buy a Ferrari. And it would have to be a 330GTC. So, after I'd figured out where the money was going to come from, the next step was to call my old friend Ernie Mendicki.
I met Ernie when I started racing in 1978. He crewed for his long-time friend Chuck Forge, who drove a very quick E Production Porsche 356. In 1988 I got a job working on vintage and collector cars. Ernie was the contact man for a Ferrari collector, and that's when I learned that Ernie wasn’t a Porsche guy at all, but that he was REALLY into Ferraris. “Gees, Michael,” Ernie told me one day, “I wish I'd known you wanted a Ferrari! Last summer there was a single headlight 330 2+2 on Long Island for $7,500—I think you could have had it for $5,000!" He was referring to the summer of ’87, right after I’d sold my racecar and taken off to Europe on the proceeds. But by early '88, Ferrari prices had started going through the roof. Ernie advised me to “buy two Ferraris now, and sell one in two years.” Would that I could have acted on his advice...
So, in 2002, if I bought a Ferrari without consulting Ernie, it would have been, number one, insulting, and number two, foolish. Ernie would have said, "Gees, Michael, why didn't you talk to me! There was this 330..."
So, in late February, I called Ernie. I'd talked with him and his wife
Mary Lou at the Monterey Historics the previous August. Mary Lou answered
the phone. "Oh, Michael, I guess you haven't heard, Ernie passed away a
few weeks ago." Oh. I’m sorry. Pause. I never know what to say. "What did
you want to talk to him about?" Now, I'd known Ernie since 1978 when I
started racing, but I'd known Mary Lou since about 1973 or so, when I used
to flag at SCCA races. So I told her of my refinance, and that I wanted
to buy a Ferrari
330GTC. "Oh, I’ve got one—you can buy mine.” Huh? "Yes, Ernie had a
330GTC." I didn't even know Ernie’d had one. On retrospect, I did remember
conversation about 330GTC’s the previous August, but I hadn't picked up
that he owned one, then. Turns out Ernie had had many, many Ferraris through
the years. Never wealthy, he had started out horse trading Ferraris—a few
hundred dollars, maybe 2 or 3 thousand, and just worked his way up. Ernie
was into historic race cars long before it was the thing. At one time he
owned the 250S that Giovanni Bracco drove to victory in the 1952 Mille
Miglia. In 1989, he was the founding president of the Pacific Region of
the Ferrari Club of America.
In early March, 2002, I went to visit Mary Lou and see Ernie's Ferrari.
Beautiful in Ferrari Red, with black leather interior and Borrani wire
wheels. Mary Lou graciously let me drive it. Heavy steering and throttle
and heavier clutch. (I swear the clutch on my Honda Civic is lighter than
the throttle on the Ferrari!) But the sound! The sound alone is half the
thrill of driving a Ferrari! Warmed up and out on the freeway, it just
didn't seem to run right. Intermittently. Mary Lou said, "That's the way
it always runs." But sometimes it just wouldn't pull. I opined that we
shouldn't drive it—it might damage the engine. Because it would occasionally
run and sound strong, I was sure it was relatively minor. Essentially tune-up.
With two cam shafts driving two distributors with four sets of points firing
twelve spark plugs pulling through three 2-barrel carburetors and two gas
tanks and two fuel pumps and two fuel filters, everything has to be right
or it runs wrong...
We took it back to the house. Overall, I guess I was under-whelmed. For some reason, I was expecting a show room perfect car that drove like a race car. It wasn't, though it looked very good for its 35 years.
Plus, I couldn’t afford it.
So, I went shopping. Ferrari Market Letter. Hemmings. Internet ads from all over the country, all over the world. Realistically, though, it pretty much had to be west coast. I called on quite a few, looked at several. Hmmmm. Let’s just say that they all looked to be quite a long ways from the showroom. Ernie’s car was looking better and better.
I picked up a digital camera—the ONLY way to inspect a car, by the way. Something you do before a session with a Ferrari expert. I took over 100 shots of one car that I was getting pretty serious about. Things show up in the pictures that you don’t notice when you’re looking at the car in person.
Weeks went by. More conversations with Mary Lou, and the upshot was that I bought Ernie’s car. A 1967 330GTC sn 10007GT. I had initially called to get his expert advice on finding a Ferrari and ended up, by the good graces of his widow Mary Lou, owning his last Ferrari. There is something special about following a friend like Ernie Mendicki as the custodian of a car like this. I do think Ernie would want me to have it; he’d laugh and say, “That wasn’t quite how I would have planned it, but just as well...” He and Mary Lou drove many happy miles in this 330GTC. I wish he could have enjoyed it for many more years, but that wasn’t in the cards. Ernie, may you rest in peace.
It also comes to me that this car will, hopefully, outlive me. Sometimes I wonder, in 100 or 200 years, who will be the custodian of this particular Ferrari creation? Will it be treasured like a Faberge egg, a Van Gough painting, or a Stradivarius violin? Will it live in a museum? Or with a private owner, who gets together with other 20th century automobile enthusiasts to put vintage, hard-to-come-by “gasoline” in the fuel tank, to revel in the sound and the smell, to imagine what it must have been like...?
I guess my point is that this car has a place in history, unlike any car I’ve ever owned before.
Anyway, in June, as the buyer-to-be, I got to shepherd the GTC to the Palo Alto Concourse. It was entered as part of “The Mendicki Collection,” a display arranged as a tribute to a well-respected gentleman. Ernie’s collection included the 1933 Auburn he’d owned for more than half of its life, a 1928 Bugatti type 40 Grand Sport, an AC Ace Bristol, a Siatta 750, and the 1909 Lozier that he’d driven in the 2002 Monterey Historics—the oldest car there. Mary Lou’s Crosley Hotshot that she’d driven in the Historics was there, also.
Finally, on July 4th, I drove my Ferrari 330GTC home, all of 34 miles. After 10 miles, it clearly wasn’t running right. By 20 miles, I was down to 35 mph on the freeway. Definitely fuel. Swerving seemed to help. Hmmm. Fuel starvation. Maybe the pickup in the tank is corroded and leaking. Didn’t I read something about that on Tom Yang’s web site? I stopped and put $20 worth of premium in it. Leaving the station, up the hill, wow, did it go! Yeah! A Ferrari on-song! Ten seconds later it started running like crap again. I made it home, barely.
Up on jack stands, I dismantled the fuel system. Both fuel tanks, both fuel pumps, both fuel filters, all of the flexible fuel lines. Pulled the tops off the carbs. There were chunks of black stuff (rubber?) in the inlet of the rear filter. Some silicone-like material in the bleed line going back into the fuel filler neck. Otherwise, remarkably little contamination. The insides of the aluminum fuel tanks looked like new! I think the major problem was with the check valves in the front mechanical fuel pump. As my old friend Tom Meadows (former Ferrari 250GTE owner) pointed out, if the check valves in the mechanical pump leak, everything the electric pump puts out just pushes backwards through the mechanical pump and right back to the rear fuel filter, then into the electric fuel pump again.
Parts came from Algar in Pennsylvania. Reformulated for today’s fuel. Both fuel pumps rebuilt, two new filters, a couple of fuel lines. Also, a new diaphragm for the heater valve between the distributors.
While the tanks were out, I POR-15’d the entire inside of the trunk. I actually worried that there wasn’t enough rust for it to work...
I got it running the weekend before the Historics. All signs of fuel starvation were gone. It ran pretty well for the Concorso Italiano in August. There is a tunnel heading into old town Pacific Grove that resonates just so; it demands a downshift and a romp on the throttle... All in all, mid-August in Monterey is a wonderful time to have a red 12 cylinder Ferrari!
Maintenance and overhaul wise, I plan to do as much as possible myself, both because I enjoy it and because I can’t afford the very few people I would trust to work on MY Ferrari...
Speaking of fixing things, there is always a trade off between originality and practicality; let’s face it, the value of the car depends on it being a Ferrari, not a Ferrari with a bunch of 3 or 4 decade newer Honda technology on it. (I work on Hondas and Acuras.) The air conditioning is a prime example. The most practical thing to do would be to install a modern compressor, evaporator, condenser, and plastic fans. But, it would look sooooo wrong. I mean, you’d open the hood and it would jump out at you that it had been modified. The same with the yellow, wire-wrapped fuel lines. There are much cheaper and better fuel lines available, but every time you opened the hood...
My philosophy is to keep it as original as possible, within reason. No irreversible mods, no extra holes drilled, nothing to change the way the car would have looked in 1967. Oh, I will make some subtle changes. But anything I modify will have to LOOK pretty original to a Ferrari enthusiast. If a Ferrari club member who owns or has owned a 330GTC doesn’t notice, then... For instance, the plan is to put an electronic ignition on it at some point, but such that the casual (Ferrari club member) observer wouldn’t know it from looking under the hood. And, the original points etc could always be reinstalled.
So far, I’ve done mostly maintenance. I’m a bit of a nut about fluid changes. Before the Palo Alto Concourse in June—it wasn’t even my car yet!—I changed all the brake and clutch fluids, using Castrol Girling LMA. It got a new battery—a Delco Professional Series Group 27F. Experience tells me it will NEVER leak or get corrosion on the terminals. It isn’t a “vintage” battery, but it is a group 27F, so the size and terminal orientation are correct. And I draw the line at originality if it means the battery leaking corrosives all over.
I changed the coolant. I decided on Sierra brand polypropylene glycol. I was vacillating between the various brands of ethylene glycol, but when I read that Switzerland had banned ethylene glycol—essentially requiring polypropylene glycol—and vintage Ferraris weren’t melting down because of it, the decision was made. My coolant isn’t going to kill any thirsty animals. Also the transaxle oil. Regular stuff, though I want to get the Swepco oil for it. And I just changed the oil. Chevron Delo 400 15W-40 with a pair of Fram 28041’s
The clutch pedal effort was extremely heavy, so I adjusted the over-center spring about as tight as it will go. It helped a lot.
What does it need? Well, right now I’ve got the valve covers off. It’s getting all new valve adjusting screws (from Algar), I’ll time the cams and set up the points and ignition timing. Then I can set up the carbs, which will get new accelerator pump diaphragms.
The shifter rattles incessantly at about 3,500-3,700 rpm, and it has an alarming tendency to go into 2nd gear when you’re aiming for 4th. The lever goes into the 4th gear slot, but the gearbox actually goes into 2nd. Kind of exciting when you’re trying for a hot upshift. Maybe adjustment, maybe the two u-joints in the shift linkage, maybe the rubber mounts for the engine and transaxle assembly. I’m told the ring and pinion is unobtainable, so I generally shift it v-e-r-y slowly.
I put it on the alignment rack at work. It’s supposed to have more caster in the front (and I thought the steering was heavy now!), and the right rear has toe-out instead of toe-in. I actually crawled under there with a handfull of wrenches to adjust the toe like I would on an Acura. Not quite; It’s got A-arms that need to be shimmed to effect a toe change!
I want to change the thermostat because the temperature doesn’t seem to be controlled properly. I chickened out last August because the thermostat housing looks like it could be a bear to remove. Corroded studs. And I want to make the AC work. I’m trying to decide if I should convert it to R134a refrigerant.
It has Borrani wire wheels with the correct angled knock-offs, (which were an option), but I actually prefer the standard alloy wheels with the straight-eared knock-offs. Something about transmitting 300 horsepower through wires... I’m in the process of thinking about the possibility of maybe getting a set of the original alloy wheels.
Right now, my emphasis is on getting it ready for the Concorso Italiano in August, which involves improving the mechanicals and maintaining the cosmetics. While it is a very good looking Ferrari, it is definitely a driver, not a concourse car; Ernie had some colorful opinions about show cars that were never driven as they were intended to be driven, and I share his desire to drive this particular Ferrari.
Hmmm. This has gotten so long that I’m tempted to hit the “back” button. I hope I haven’t bored you too much. Right now, I need to get busy on my Ferrari. See you all at the Concorso Italiano!