Here’s What It Has Cost Me To Run A Classic Ferrari For Three And A Half Years

Talking about money. It’s all a bit unseemly isn’t it? A bit gauche, darling. We don’t discuss such things. Just not done, especially if you’re British. The only money-related thing we’re happy to talk about is property prices – our obsession with the cost of bricks and mortar is rivalled only by our preoccupation with the weather. Unless, like me, you don’t own a property, in which case such conversations are going to drive you into a murderous rage or send you into a corner to quietly sob at the injustice of it all. You’d have to pull the fingernails out of British person to find out what they earn, which is probably why salaries are so low here. We’re so repressed sometimes when a little more openness might benefit everyone.

In that vein, then for your amusement and to the horror of my credit card balance, I am going to walk you through exactly what it has cost me to run a classic Ferrari for the last three and half years. There are a lot of misconceptions about what it really costs to own and maintain one of these glorious cars. Depending on your relationship with money this article will either reinforce or dispel them. Owning an old Ferrari could be considered the final boss of classic car ownership: you survive or you get financially creamed.

I want to say up front, and for the record, I am not of means. I like to say if I were rich I wouldn’t be working here, but as David pointed out to me of course I would because I love it and nowhere else will have me. I hate it when he’s right. A while back, I came into a small amount of money and rather than sticking in the bank for a paltry return, decided a better idea would be to buy a car I could use and have fun with. Something to get me out of the house at the weekend. I didn’t specifically set out to buy a Ferrari, but classic car values being what they are in the UK it represented fantastic value for money. Walking car designer cliché that I am, I thought about a 911, but the Singer Tax has pushed values of anything air cooled into orbit, even the cabriolets, which I would have been happy with because I’m a terrible show off. I also considered a DeLorean, but they come up for sale about as often as Jason gets Cold Start done on time and would have been over my budget. A car designer friend of mine sold his a few years back for £48k before emigrating to Japan. Bloody eighties nostalgia ruining everything.

A Red Letter Day

Back to the red cars. I’ve always loved the 348, probably because it was the one that was always popping up in car magazines when I started buying them. The 348 being a bit unloved and undervalued suited me right down to the ground. The trouble is everyone else has cottoned on to their (relatively) analog charms and they’re no longer the bargains they used to be. I would later realize I had inadvertently dodged a massive prancing horse kick to the wallet by not being able to afford one. But the red seed had been planted in my brain and it wasn’t leaving anytime soon. So I started looking at Mondials. This was back in the dying months of 2021.

The looking part didn’t take long as there were only three available at the time. I plumped for the middle option, a one-owner totally original car that had been parked in a barn for a few years. I viewed the car at a dealer in December 2021, and a full recommissioning, including the all important cambelt change was included in the purchase price. And so in early January 2022 I had my very own 1983 Ferrari Mondial QV parked outside my house next to my 2011 Range Rover Sport. Why own one unreliable, badly built, breakdown-prone car when you can have two?

Let’s stick a rusty screwdriver through that myth first. Older Ferraris are not underbuilt cars constructed from week-old pasta sauce and communion wafers. Being built from steel and with some aluminum panels, the Mondial weighs just over 3000lbs (1400kgs) so for a smallish car it’s an absolute unit. The engine and gearbox have been in service since the 308 GT4 in 1974 and as was pointed out to me by an auto journo friend, developed by serious helmsmen ragging the things around the Fiorano test track for months on end. Being a QV as opposed to a later T model, the most complicated part of my Mondial is the original dealer fit Pioneer KE-4300 stereo, which doesn’t even have a digital display. It does have electronic ignition but the fuel injection system is the boat anchor simple Bosch K-Jetronic mechanical setup. It’s got an advanced mechanical specification (limited slip diff, vented discs all round) for the time, but the Mondial is not a car stuffed with mysterious black box modules that expensively fail as soon as they meet the damp British climate. It doesn’t even have power steering or ABS. It’s held together with nuts, bolts and screws in the usual old car way – there’s no fragile plastic trim clips holding the interior together. Given enough beer and a free afternoon you can easily figure out how it comes apart.

Breaking down the expenses individually wouldn’t make for a particularly engrossing read, so I’m going to walk you through what I spent as I spent it throughout my Italian romance so far. This will help me keep it all straight in my head and hopefully be a more compelling story. At the end, we’ll come to some conclusions and add it all up. Sound good? Oh and one more thing – I’m going to keep the costs in Pounds Sterling and then convert it to freedom pounds at the end, because to paraphrase a great woman I write for The Autopian boo boo and I don’t have that kind of time. Also it reduces the opportunity for me to make a mistake in one of the conversions and upset David.

Teething Problems In 2022

I didn’t know what I was going to use the car for when I first got it. It was January and too early in the year for any car events to be happening. Because I was itching to drive it the first thing I did was get groceries for the week, something the Mondial was unsurprisingly adept at because it has a full size, regularly shaped trunk. Parallel parking when I got home I noticed a few tell tale spots of coolant in the road. I wasn’t unduly worried but a couple more local drives resulted in the right hand side intake doing a good impression of a kettle at full boil. Checking the coolant tank the level was fine – I guess it doesn’t take much to make a lot of steam. But now I had spent a bit of time with the car a few other small problems made an appearance. The fuel gauge was a bit reluctant to give an accurate indication of the tank’s contents, sound was only coming out of one door speaker, some of the segments of the digital clock didn’t work, and while the engine sounded terrific the exhaust note didn’t give me the feeling of winding out a 126C2 along the Coventry bypass.

I figured the fuel gauge sender unit was a bit sticky from sitting idle for a decade and that a couple of tanks of super unleaded would free it up. I rang the dealer who sold me the car and he agreed this seemed a prudent course of action, although he was at pains to point out the reserve light, which comes on when there’s 15 liters (about 4 US gallons) left in the tank did work. Reserve light or no light, a couple of tanks of gas later the fuel gauge still didn’t work properly.

So we have a small coolant leak, superb mono sound, and an inoperative fuel gauge. The exhaust note wasn’t exactly a reliability issue, but being a showoff that’s what I dealt with first. Ryan Edwards Exhaust Fabrication at Bicester Heritage knocked up a custom system for me at £960. The Mondial now sounded amazing, but this highlighted another problem – a misfire. Upon double-checking the paperwork I got with the car, when it was recommissioned at Ferrari specialists QV London they replaced THREE HT leads? Who the bloody hell only replaces three ignition leads on an eight cylinder car? I suspected the dealer who sold me the car was being cheap to keep his profit margin fat. Further evidence to support this theory would be uncovered in the future.

It was time to put in a call to Migliore cars (who have been the Mondial’s custodians throughout) in Bromsgrove about a 45-minute drive away. The fuel tank sender units are no longer available – they would attempt a repair or adapt a different unit to fit – but the tank would need to be dropped. Like all small specialist operations they are insanely busy so sorting that, plus tracing the coolant leak, checking the car over and fitting a new set of leads took two months. That final bill came to £1300, including £322 for the leads. At least they were red.

While the car was away, I investigated fixing the digital clock. My naïve assumption was it was shared with some Fiat or other as the Mondial was the first Ferrari built with significant input from them. No such luck and of course no longer available. This was one of the first lessons about classic Ferrari ownership I learned. The mechanical and consumable parts are widely shared with other mid-engined V8 Ferraris of similar vintage and therefore commonly available and reasonably priced. It’s the interior and electronic components that are hard to get and ruinously expensive when they do come up second-hand. Someone on the excellent and surprisingly not-full-of-wankers Ferrari forums had pulled the clock apart and simply soldered in new seven segment LED units. I ordered four from eBay for £10, but no way was I going to attempt to solder them myself.

Once I had the Ferrari back with a working fuel gauge, no coolant leak or misfire, I spent an afternoon upside down in the passenger footwell yanking out the classic twin spindle style Pioneer stereo to figure out why I was only getting music from one door. Some swapping round of the left and right channel confirmed it was definitely the stereo and not the speakers or wiring. So I found an electronics firm in Sheffield who were happy to look at it and solder the new LEDs into the clock PCB for me. £100 including return postage. The central locking also stopped working on the passenger side, which turned out to be the door mechanism itself. I got a secondhand unit from exotic car dismantlers Eurospares for £60.

I didn’t venture too far for the rest of the year, totaling about 1450 miles. I still tried to get it out every couple of weeks because Ferraris don’t like to sit around but the furthest from home I ventured was two visits to the Sunday Scramble at Bicester Heritage during the summer, about an hour away. I wanted to make sure there we no more problems lurking before making plans for longer trips in 2023.

Into 2023

That Christmas I took it to my best friend’s house in Wales. After surviving the holidays and sitting for a few weeks, I opened the garage door and was greeted with a small puddle of coolant on the floor. This time I could see which hose was leaking so I replaced it myself, which you can read about here. Total cost £21. Annoyance and faffing around cost: off the charts.

You haven’t really owned an Italian car unless some weird design idiosyncrasy makes your life difficult. Something that had been bugging me about the Mondial for a while was the cigarette lighter. Eighties Italian car cigarette lighters are made solely for the purpose of firing up a heater and nothing else. Unlike a normal lighter you push in and remove, there’s a narrow hole you put your cigarette into like dipping a pickle into a jar of mustard. Then after a few seconds, you remove your lit cigarette and enter flavor country. Normal 12v accessories wouldn’t fit into this tight opening. I didn’t want to take a chance on a cheap Amazon 12v socket so I spent £25 on one from a reputable electronics firm and spent another afternoon upside down removing the entire center console to fit it.

Getting a hand wash job at my local car wash place revealed the door seals on both sides leaked like a newborn baby. This is the sort of stuff you don’t even think about on a newer car but on an old car just forms part of the constant rotation of stuff that wears out and needs replacement. New seals are available at a princely £336.52 for the pair. I bought ten meters (33ft) of generic door seal with the same profile from eBay for £56. Because I am lazy and didn’t like having to set the clock every time I took the car out, I never bothered using the built-in battery isolator. You can guess where this is going. The supplying dealer had fitted a cheap junk battery that was now knackered despite being a little more than a year old. I fitted a high spec Bosch replacement for £135. And started using the isolator. Then backing out of the garage one day the steering felt heavier than usual. A self tapping screw had gone through the tread of one of the TRXs rendering it as flat as a turd. New TRXs are available because Michelin knocks out a batch every so often, but they are £361 each. I got the puncture repaired and all the pressures checked at my local tire place for £28.

My first proper long journey was a public holiday weekend away at Brands Hatch to watch the Historic Grand Prix cars. About 130 miles away, albeit slightly lengthened by the fact I was going to pick up my brother from East London. Our lovely members all know what happened and so if you’re not (and why not?), at the end of the M11 just outside London I noticed the temperature gauge was pinned to the red. This part of the Big Smoke is my old manor, so I knew there was a gas station half a mile away I could limp to. The water pump had seized and consequently snapped the accessory belt. Because it was a holiday weekend the Ferrari couldn’t be recovered straight to Migliore as they wouldn’t be open. My breakdown service promised me a two-leg recovery saying they would collect the car from house Tuesday and take it to the garage, but they reneged and denied saying this leaving me £200 out of pocket to the get the Mondial hoisted onto a flatbed and taken to Migliore by a local firm.

While Migliore had the car for the water pump replacement I had the yearly service done and a booster kit fitted to speed up the driver’s side window, a common issue on old Ferraris due to the way the windows are wired through a relay or something. At the same time, the driveshaft gaiters also needed replacement. That was the second of my big bills and it totaled £1728.

This might all seem like a lot at 18 months in, but it’s important to remember the Mondial is an old car. Stuff is going to wear out whether it’s a Ferrari or a Fiesta. Seals, rubbers and plastic components all age out regardless of which factory screwed the thing together. It’s just the irrevocable march of time. In 2023, the car turned 40 and I turned 50, so to prove to myself and to the Ferrari it wasn’t a temperamental diva first up was a trip to Le Mans Classic in June, a journey of just over 1000 miles. Later in the year, I took it back to place where it was born, Maranello, as part of a weeklong pan-European road trip to the Italian Grand Prix. Once back home I had time to unpack, have a cup of coffee and repack before heading straight back out again to go and meet a car dealer and my twin brother at Goodwood. That came to 2500 miles in eight days and the Ferrari did not miss a beat, sitting quite happily on uncongested European motorways at 80 mph.

Not Much Driving In 2024 But It Still Broke Down

The problem of 2024 came in May when the clutch slave cylinder failed. Luckily, this happened near home, so the inconvenience wasn’t too great. The parts were £116 and the total bill was £349, again from Migliore. Because I spent lot of last year flying to see friends and being a fabulous goth in Germany, the Ferrari didn’t get a lot of use. Towards the end of the summer, I did manage take it to the Retro Rides Gathering at Mallory Park. After sitting in the sun all afternoon, when it came to leave I turned the key and bupkis. Not a click. Not a whirr. Nothing. Embarrassingly, I was one of the last to leave to had to cadge a bump start from Johnny Smith of Late Brake Show fame and his mates. At least he’ll remember me now. Then this weird non-starting fault the sort of fixed itself. Autopian contributor, Italian car whisperer and good friend Andrea Petersen visited my damp little island in November and OF COURSE the Mondial behaved impeccably when I took her out in it. The fault didn’t reappear until earlier this year when I wanted to take the car to a media event in Coventry. The morning I got it out of the garage it was fine. But when I jumped in the afternoon it flatly refused to start again. Serves me right for wanting to show off to my media mates. Recovery service called again, Ferrari recovered to Migliore again.

Those of you keeping track will have realized that up to this juncture I have had the car in my possession for a little over three years. So you know what that means–cambelt time. I cheated slightly in 2024 and didn’t have the car serviced simply because I didn’t use it much, so a fluids, plugs, and filters refresh was due as well. Although the Ferrari is now over forty and doesn’t legally require an annual MOT test I figured it’s always prudent to get one done anyway. Not only is it a good check over, anyone who wants to know the car’s roadworthiness history can look it up online. Migliore informed me on the way to the test station there was an overpowering smell of gas –  a new fuel accumulator at £280 please. The non-starting issue was low voltage (again) at the starter motor, solved by running a relay directly to it, a common fix. The total bill this time was, are you sitting down, £2137. Including the mandatory £50 for the MOT test. Bloody hell. And that brings us up to date, as I sold my remaining kidney to pay that bill a couple of weeks ago.

What I Spent

Aside from all these minor maintenance costs, what else have I spent? Before heading to Europe, I thought it wise to fit some more modern headlamp bulbs, £50. These Ferrari V8s also burn a bit of oil. The specified grade is 20w50, and you can’t use synthetic because it attacks the seals. I went through three 5-liter bottles of Valvoline VR1 at £45 a pop. Classic car insurance (limited mileage, agreed value) was about £250 for the first year and £275 for the second. Last year it jumped to £450 and this year it’s gone up slightly again to £468. For the first two years of ownership before it became exempt, the Mondial was liable for Road Tax at £295 per year.

All right, like yanking off a plaster or getting an eyebrow piercing the painful bit is best done quickly so let’s start adding it all up.

Fixed Costs:

Insurance, 4 years: £1443
Road Tax, 2 years: £590
MOT, 3 Years: £130
Storage: £2160

Total: £4323

Now the maintenance and sundries:

Stereo and Clock Repair: £110
Custom Exhaust: £960
New Battery: £135
New Door Seals: £56
Passenger Door Lock: £60
Coolant Hose: £21
12v Accessory Socket: £25
Puncture Repair: £28
New Headlight Bulbs: £50
Valvoline VR-1 Engine Oil: £135

Total: £1580

Major Maintenance and Repairs at Migliore Cars:

April 2022 (drop tank, new HT leads, change top hose): £1300
June 2023 (water pump, service, driveshaft gaiters, window booster): £1728
May 2024 (clutch slave cylinder): £350
Additional Recovery for above: £200
April 2025 (cambelt change, yearly service, starting fault, MOT): £2138

Total: £5716

Fuel (7560 miles @ £6.40 gallon approx.): £1920

GRAND TOTAL SPENT: £13,539 ($17,987)

Bloody hell. When you add it all up like that, it sounds like a lot. And truth be told, it is. Every mile I’ve driven in the Ferrari, it has cost me about £1.79 ($2.38). I haven’t included my yearly breakdown cover with the AA because I have that anyway for my daily driver. Likewise, I haven’t included ferry crossings and European motorway tolls because I would have paid them whatever I drove, although to be fair I wouldn’t have thought about driving to the Italian GP if I didn’t have a Ferrari. I didn’t buy the car with content in mind, but some of this figure is offset by the pieces I’ve written about it here and at the insurance company. But I’m not telling you how much I earned because we don’t talk about money darling, remember?

I don’t think the Mondial has been more troublesome than any other classic car would be. It’s just the issue with owning a Ferrari in the UK at least, is provenance. You simply must have it. Anyone buying one of these cars wants to see a nice fat service history stuffed with receipts for work carried out by people who know what they are doing. And this is aside from the fact I don’t have the skills or the facilities to carry out any in-depth work anyway. If you think I spent a lot, I met a chap with a 360 Modena who had to buy two new engine ECUs at a couple of thousand pounds. Each. The Mondial might be the last remaining attainable Ferrari, but even the later Mondial T which shares its engine with the 348 is a big step up in maintenance because of the additional electronics those cars contain. I went into Ferrari ownership with my eyes wide open but the truth is it’s just too much of a stretch for me. So soon it will be going up for sale, hopefully to be replaced by something a bit more manageable. A car that’s a bit more downtown. A bit more me. One that doesn’t require expensive visits to a specialist garage to maintain its provenance. A car I know inside and out. The love of my life, a Capri 2.8 injection.

In the meantime, do you think sleep deprived David will notice if I invoice him $18,000 dollars for this piece? Or should I just ask for a pay rise?

All images the author unless otherwise stated. Top image credits: Adrian Clarke, eBay, Deposit Photos