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Operation Red Pill Begins - Ferrari 360 Modena Engine Swap!
This has been a long time in the making.
Started researching swap engine options back in October, almost immediately after the very first time I drove the car @ MRLS.
I said it before, my favorite engines are small displacement angry V8s.
I know it sounds silly, but ever since I was a kid I loved Ferraris, had 288GTO and F40 posters on the wall, it's kind of my go-to dream car marque for like the last 35 years... so when I started looking at the options I did some snooping around on eBay and realized that while I don't have the budget to buy myself a Ferrari, I could swing a Ferrari engine.
Wheels started rolling, more research about Ferrari and Maserati engines went on... Maserati engines are much cheaper but also seriously downgraded.
I would've loved to do a Hartley / Synergy type race engine, but $50K and short life expectancy didn't sound like a great idea, and long story short, I figured out the 360 Modena engine fits the bill.
It's exactly the style of engine that I like - flat plane crank 3.6L 40 valve V8 w/ 8700 RPM redline is small and angry.
The ferocious soundtrack of the 360 Modena is a huge bonus - I WILL NEVER GET TIRED OF THIS SOUND!
Did some research about electronics and trans options, figured out what can be used and how and by the time December rolled around I pulled the trigger and bought the engine.
Yes, I have the engine for almost 6 months now. I know.
Then I spent a few months working out some details in the background like the trans and by the time I was ready to announce what engine is getting swapped into Morpheus and get things going, up came the Level 5 Motorsport auction.
For those who don't know anything about it, Level 5 was a big time race team that had to liquidate all of the assets due to legal trouble the owner got himself into, but the important bit was that Level 5 was running Ferraris including a couple of 430s and they had a couple of spare 430 engines that went up for sale in the auction.
The 430 is everything that 360 is, just more and better and with very little weight penalty, only 8-9 Lbs difference.
Problem is they are typically selling in high $20's - low $30's zone which is way out of reach for me but I had hopes for the auction, so I lined up some funds and waited to the auction date which was over a month later (it was 2 or 3 weeks ago).
The day of the auction had all the high pulse and heavy breathing I could come up with short of getting heart attack, haha!
I ended up being the second highest bidder on the engine I wanted, someone wanted it more and had more money to play with
So back to plan #1 we went and all I needed was a date that was workable in terms of doing a meet at the shop with some of my friends in the biz, that ended up being a couple days ago and here we are.
Before the meet we wanted to get Creampuff off the lift and ready to rock so I spent some quality time on it over the last few days and by the time Friday afternoon rolled around the shop was all organized, clean and ready for our Operation Red Pill meet at the shop -
Saturday noon rolled around and people were arriving, had some beer, catching up with friends, vendors and showing some projects around the shop like the N1000RR and the NSU EV we're building for customers.
Time to reveal the big secret!
We had a shop with many excited car guys and smiles all around when the curtain was lifted and then the wheels started rolling.
It's not every day that you get to discuss a fun project like this one with 3 of your favorite car geeks, and I enjoyed every moment of the discussion that we had between Dave Coleman, Jay Kavanagh, Mike Kojima and yours truly -
It was fun and the people in the house got exactly what this project is about.
Now you all know what's going on, and I'll update every now and again
TBH I haven't even checked, maybe I'll take a look later if the build fits into the rules, but I have no intention to change a single thing if it doesn't..
Thank you Moti for letting me come up and get a sneak peek at the evil plans for world domination on Friday. Great to hang out for a bit and shoot around ideas.
There's a lot of genius in this, and a little bit of crazy. Which is perfect. Doing what everyone else is doing is the fastest way to guarantee yourself 2nd place, not to mention that just isn't what Blackbird Fabworx is about anyways. This is way more than a bid for media exposure, this should be a wicked recipe for the car.
The dry sump setup from the factory is one feature that should not be underestimated. Sure you can custom dry sump just about any engine, but usually you can't drop the engine much at all because the bell housing, flywheel, etc. etc. are all still there limiting ground clearance. Factory dry sump means everything else was designed with that lower clearance in mind. The 360 engine is 18.5" tall from top of valve cover to bottom of pan. For perspective, a BP motor is about 23.5" tall. That is a huge deal for center of mass, and just not something you can accomplish without finding a motor that came that way right off the engineer's CAD software at the factory.
Mother of God....
05-29-2017, 01:35 PM
Operation Red Pill Begins - Ferrari 360 Modena Engine Swap!
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