More Jonny Maserati videos...

Here's the short videos I took at the weekend during my photo shoot with the Ghibli! Unfortunately, I don't have a video camera so was just using the video function on my old digital camera... hence the quality is not great. Still, gives a decent enough impression though.

The first one is a standard rear shot of the car with me revving the crap out of it. Compared to the video I took a couple of years back when I just installed the Larini exhaust, the car now sounds a fair bit louder. I therefore think that the Larini silencers have opened up a bit... which isn't a bad thing since I think the car is sounding good!


This second video is taken in the engine bay... there's quite a lot of background noise since the radiator fan was working a fair bit (since I had the car parked and idling for a while), but when I open up the throttle you can still here the engine! You can also see the Forge blow off valves opening and closing, but unfortunately since there's no load on the engine then there's no inlet pressure building up, so you can't hear the valves blow off any pressure. I'll have to take a video from inside the car one day when I'm driving it hard so that you can hear all the noises that it's now making.


Hope you enjoy them!

How's your German?

Mov'it have this video feed on their website which is quite interesting. It would probably be even more interesting if I could understand German!

If I fit a big brake system to my Ghibli then I will no longer be able to fit the original 16" wheels. Which means there's no point in keeping them. Which means that I may as well sell them and put the money towards the new brake system!

Where's my credit card...

Determining disc diamter

I got the opportunity to measure the smallest internal diameter on my wheel today. As indicated in the picture below, it's approximately 390mm measured from the front.


The diameter does taper out behind where I measured this diameter, but from what I can feel with my finger, only by about another 10-15mm increase in radius.

With reference to the Mov'it measurement guide, in order to fit a 370mm diameter 4-pot kit I need 418mm internal diameter to accomodate the disc and caliper. I'm not confident that I have this much space inside the wheel... it would be a very close fit!

I'm therefore convincing myself that the 342mm kit will suffice and that 370mm would be overkill anyway. The largest disc size I've seen fitted to a Ghibli is around 330mm. Generally, the largest I've seen fitted to a 3200 GT is 350mm. Bearing in mind that the 3200 GT weighs about 300kg more than the Ghibli, fitting the 342mm kit should provide more than sufficient braking power! In terms of aesthetics, it should look fine too... you'll just be able to see the full caliper through the spokes, where with the 370mm discs the caliper would be slightly hidden behind the rim.

In terms of axial clearance, I measured at least 80mm clearance between the spokes on the wheel and the current disc, so there shouldn't be any issues there.

Getting technical... the disc braking area currently on my car is approximately 42,312mm2 (300mm by 190mm disc diameter). With the new disc, the braking area is approximately 63,478mm2 (347mm by 190mm disc diameter). Therfore, the effective increase in disc braking area is 50%. I think that's good enough!

Photographic weekend

The weekend turned out to be a relatively quiet one. I did manage to get a couple of drives in though and yesterday took the car on a bit of a photo shoot... Compomotive wheels informed me that if I took some decent photos of my car then they'd include them in their new website. So here's a couple of choice pics!


I took a couple of quick videos of the exhaust note and in the engine bay which I'll post as soon as they've been cleared by Google video.

The car's running good! I played around with the wastegate opening pressure on the E-Boost and now have it set at 1.15 bar. This means that the wastegates now do not start to open until this pressure is measured in the plenum chamber. The idea is to generate full boost from the turbos for as long as possible in order to attain maximum torque. The boost pressure is currently set to around 1.19 bar, but keeping the wastegates closed until 1.15 bar results in the boost pressure spiking to 1.22 bar in low gears. What I'll probably do is trim this back slightly to around 1.13 bar and then start playing with the sensitivity.

The result is that indeed, the car is feeling pretty torquey and the pressure is zipping up to high boost nice and quickly now. I'm also running BP Ultimate 98 RON fuel which seems to help also! The car's also making a fantastic amount of noise!

Coolingmist water injection

I was just having a look on Coolingmist's website at their water injection system, since it's significantly cheaper than the Aquamist system. What caught my eye is this water tank that they sell, which is designed to sit in the boot of the car AND accommodate the water injection pump. I quite like the idea.

However, I'm not overly impressed with their control system. As far as I can make out, it does not monitor the duty cycle of the fuel injectors like the Aquamist 2d system does; it only measures boost pressure and inlet temperature (and/or exhaust temperature). Although you can set up the system to follow maps, these appear to be relative to boost pressure.

I don't think this is a good idea. From what I've read, there's not much to be gained running water injection below 1 bar inlet pressure... you're better off running a high octane fuel. So in my mind, there's no point even running water injection unless the boost goes above 1 bar. Once above 1 bar, it seems that World War II research shows that best results come from following a fixed ratio of water to fuel. Therefore, the more fuel you inject in the cyclinder, the more water you inject, but in a fixed ratio (in the order of 10%).

I know on my car that I don't need to have my foot hard on the throttle to attain 1 bar boost. Therefore, the water injection system needs to be able to monitor the amount of fuel that is being injected into the engine in order to know how much water to inject. The Aquamist system does this by monitoring the control signal sent from the engine management system to one of the fuel injectors (and multiplies this by six (well, three actually, since during one revolution there's only 3 induction strokes) for the Ghibli, since it has six cylinders. From what I can make out, the Coolingmist system doesn't do this. I'm also not too impressed with the blocked nozzle detection that they offer... it has no automoated fail safe if water stops flowing. With the Aquamist system I can set it up to trigger my E-Boost to run safe boost pressure if water stops flowing.


So, despite the cost difference, I'm going to stick with the Aquamist system. Regarding the tank, the Coolingmist boot mounted option is nice, but I've been giving some more thought on this and I think that the Ghibli's windscreen washer tank should be accessible enough to utilise instead. I'm therefore now thinking that I'll mount the pump in the engine bay instead of the boot. This will necessitate running thick, heavy duty cable from the battery in the boot, but I don't suppose this is too much of an issue. Since manufacture of the water tank for the boot was one of the barriers for me ordering the system, then bypassing this requirement means that I'm one step closer to ordering the kit! I just need to check that I can indeed access the windscreen washer tank (item 35 in the drawing above, located between the body panels in the driver's side front wing, hopefully accessible from the wheel arch), since I'll probably have to remove it in order to install the barb connection for the supply hose to the pump and in order to install the float switch to warn when the tank is getting empty (and to switch the system to fail safe). To get to the windscreen washer tank I'll have to remove item number 22 in the drawing below.


The other barrier to ordering the Aquamist kit is the location of the water injection nozzles. I would like to use two, one on each of inlet pipes where I have the blow off valves fitted. This means sending them off to Forge to have some flat spots welded on and then holes drilled and tapped. So instead, I'm thinking of using a single nozzle located on the Y-piece just infront of the throttle body. I think there's a flat, thick walled section on this piece already which would be suitable for locating the nozzle.


So a couple of things for me to try out, maybe this weekend?

Ghibli strut brace news

I wrote to the owner of the Ghibli that I mentioned yesterday and he replied indicating that he purchased the car with the strut brace already installed.

He said that the previous owner had the Ghibli modified to 1996 Open Cup Evo specification. You can read about these specs on Enrico's pages, but essentially the consist of new exhaust system, larger brake discs, larger 18" wheels to accommodate the larger brakes and improved front suspension. He obviously didn't have the body modifications added like the front spoiler and rear wing... fortunately, since I think these look absolutely awful!

I was not aware that Maserati manufactured a strut brace as part of the Open Cup Evo spec, so I suspect that the previous owner of the car had this brace specially made.

Looking at the spec of the Open Cup cars, I think I'm on the right track with the modifications I'm carrying out to my car. I've already got some more efficient roller bearing turbos fitted, I've increased the rev limiter to above 7000 rpm, I've got a more efficient (and louder) exhaust system fitted and I've got the larger wheels fitted in order to accomodate larger disc brakes (which is my next project). So I just need to work on the suspension, although I'm a bit reluctant to, since I want to keep the car practical to drive on the streets, which means I don't want to lower the ride height.

Ghibli strut brace spotted!

I remember a few years back stumbling across this website when I was doing research into buying a Ghibli. I've just stumbled across it again... a Ghibli owned by a German fella by the looks of things.

Anyway, looking through the pictures of his nice looking silver Ghibli GT, I noticed that he's had a front strut brace fitted. Taking a closer look, it's definitely not a Sparco one, so chances are he had it custom made? I'll see if I can drop him an email and get some more info on it.

Maserati Ghibli review

This review has been on the web for quite some time, but I thought I'd put a link to it here anyway... just for completeness!

It's interesting that they only give it three out of five, but give it four out of five for value? Still, I'm not complaining... one of the good things about the Ghibli is that it's exclusive... so I don't want people going 'round saying how good it is and then lots of people wanting to buy one... I want it to remain a secret!

An example of what I mean is the older BMW M3s (against which the Ghibli was pitched). Technically, these are very good cars (although I'm not so keen on the aesthetics of them), but they're really common and all sorts of unscrupulous characters own them! Also, since the M3 is essentially a hot version of a mass produced car (the BMW 3 series), you inevitably get people who think that simply sticking an M-Power badge on their crappy 318 will transform it into a racing machine... or at the very least trick people into thinking that they indeed possess the real deal.

At least with the Ghibli there's no risk of this happening, since a Ghibli is a Ghibli. In my humble opinion, there shouldn't be different versions of a car. It should be designed for a specific engine... specific suspension... if a car manufacturer thinks that they can improve a car model, then they should do so and then only offer that car (which is how the Ghibli evolved). When BMW bring out an M version of their car, what they're really saying is that the "normal" car is sub-standard. A car should be designed for a specific purpose... a Grand Tourismo (GT) car is designed with one objective... to get from A to B as quickly and as comfortably as possible. This is what the Ghibli fulfils. A classic Fiat 500 was designed to be small and cheap... and this is what it is. It's not designed to be small, cheap... and fast. So don't buy a tuned Fiat 500 and think that you're cool.

Think of a Fiat 500 and you think of a little bubble car with skinny little wheels. Think of a BMW 3 series and... well, you don't instinctively think of the M version... you think of a four seater saloon. Think of a Ghibli and you instantly think of a fast car.

Blimey... this has turned into a bit of a rant!

Update on V-Power

I did some research on V-Power and came across the following:

V-Power in the Netherlands is a 97 octane fuel. Officially it has a 95 label because 97 just doens't exist. And since it is not a 98 octane, they can't call it a 98 octane fuel.

In Belgium it is 98 and in Germany even 100 octane. The decision to use a 97 octane was based on a market search. For that reason, we get different kind of fuels in different countries. It is unlikely that V-Power in the Netherlands will be adapted in the short future since it has just been introduced.

It is also true that not all cars run good on this 97 octane fuel. There is a small number of modern cars and older cars that simply run better on an higher octane. Unfortunately, Shell can't help them out since they don't have the 98 octane fuel anymore.

Most cars however run even better on V-Power. It all depends on the motor of the car. The additives are very good in cleaning out the motor which ends up in a better performance an fuel economy. That can sometimes take a bit of time since a motor is not clean again after just 1 time of taking fuel.

I'll continue to run some of my own tests to determine which fuel is best for the car.

I do Ron, Ron, Ron...

When I picked up my car from its big service the other week, it seemed to be running pretty good. I dropped of the car at the garge with the fuel tank almost empty, but when I picked it up I noticed that there was a bit more fuel in the tank, so I presume that Jorrit had topped it up a bit (I'm sure I'll find out when I receive the bill, since he will undoubtedly charge me for it).

I think Jorrit uses either Texaco or Total fuels... mainly because he has a discount card for his local petrol station, but also because they offer 98 RON in the Netherlands. For various reasons, I've been using Shell fuels. Until about a year ago, Shell also offered 98 RON fuels in their petrol stations, but this has since been phased out and replaced with V-Power. V-Power is 95 RON in the Netherlands and as far as 95 RON petrol goes, I have no reason to believe that it's no good. In fact, I have a bit of insider knowledge so I know that it's better than 95 RON fuel and it's also better utilising our hydrocarbon resources (but I won't go into that here).

Since Jorrit only put a splash of fuel into my car, I've since refueled on V-Power. Not long after doing so, the car seemed to feel a bit flatter... a bit less responsive. Also, if I think back to the recent dyno runs carried out with my car, they've been with 95 RON V-Power rather than the 98 RON fuel that I used to use. So I'm starting to think that using 95 RON V-Power in my car is not the best. High octane fuel offers resistance to engine knock, as you can read about on Wikipedia. What I've seen on recent dyno runs is that my car is running very rich. A rich mixture may be symptomatic of a poor setup, but it can also indicate that the engine management system is detecting some engine knock.

If the engine management system detects knock it can do a number of things. It can retard the spark or it can increase the air/fuel mixture, making the engine run rich. I have a strong suspision that when I run 95 RON V-Power in my car I loose power... the car feels more sluggish and on the dyno it seems to run rich. I'm therefore going to try running on 98 RON fuel for a while (maybe try out BP Ultimate) and see how it feels before taking the car back to the dyno. It will be really interesting to see if there's a difference in output between the different fuels. Given that my Ghibli runs with a decent amount of boost and that the intercoolers are not as effective as they could be (i.e. the charge is both high pressure and high temperature, both of which increase the tendency for knocking), I suspect that the fuel's octane rating could have a significant effect on the engine's output, maybe as much as 10-20hp?

I'll keep you posted on the results!

Good news on the Mov'it front

I just received an email from Mov'it... they can make a brake kit for my Ghibli!


Given that I now have 18" wheels fitted to my Ghibli, Mov'it are proposing to go with a 370mm x 35mm disc on the front with 4 pot calipers, as fitted to this Alfa 156 GTA pictured above. This Alfa actually has 19" wheels fitted, so with my 18" wheels the discs will completely fill the rims!

I enquired about fitting 6 pot calipers, but Mov'it considered this a bit overkill given the weight of the Ghibli... I tend to agree if I crunch the numbers. The original brakes on the Ghibli are already pretty good for street driving. Although I've not been on the track with the car, I can imagine they would fade pretty severely unless racing discs and pads were fitted. However, my main reasons for changing out the brakes are primarily that I need new discs and/or pads anyway (the ones currently fitted are fading badly for some reason), plus, with the new wheels the aesthetics of the small discs do not fit in with the new wheels.

But back to the number crunching, increasing the discs from the stock 300mm to 370mm is already an increase in area of 50 per cent! That in itself will yield terrific performance increases, since there will be more contact area between the pads and the disc (since the new caliper and brake pads are also scaled up in size). Also, a larger disc acts as a bigger heat sink, which means that the brake is a lot less likely to overheat in normal driving conditions. And if the brake does get hot, the larger surface area of the new disc means that it will dissipate heat quicker to the atmosphere, which again means that it should run much cooler than the stock brakes and hence overcome the problem of insufficient cooling with the original set up.

To make things better, Mov'it can also manufacture a rear brake kit for the Ghibli! Not only does this look great (so vane!) but it potentially would further improve the braking dynamics of the car, preventing the back from becoming too light and trying to overtake the front! I'd have to see how the car performed with the front kit (and also save up for a few months, since the rear kit is almost as expensive as the front kit!) before entertaining the idea of fitting a rear upgrade kit... it's very tempting though!

Movit Brakes for Maserati Ghibli

I happened to stumble on another brake manufacturer today, the German company Mov'it. I did a bit of research and their brakes seem to be quite highly regarded... from what I can make out they're the OEM for Porsche?

So I sent off an equiry to them for my Ghibli and I got an immediate enthusiastic response. So good initial impression. I informed the sales guy about my Ghibli being an early model and that I wanted larger discs to make the most of my new wheels... so he should be getting back to me soon after conferring with the technical chief in Germany. Sounds promising...

Water injection

I was pointed towards an interesting article written by AutoSpeed about water injection by one of the guys on the Dutch Maserati Club web forum.

I've been toying with the idea of using water injection on my Ghibli for some time, as I've described in a previous post. I actually discussed this topic with Jorrit at Auto Forza last week... he's always been a bit anti water injection, since he says it's curing the symptoms and not the cause of the problem. He's right... the problem is predominantly related to charge temperature and if good sized, efficient intercoolers are utilised that are located in at the front of the car with plenty of airflow potential across them, then a water injection system should become pretty redundent.

However, the problem with the Ghibli is that the intercoolers are pretty small, not particularly efficient and not particularly well located with respecto to air flow. Redesigning the intercoolers is not an easy task... even the likes of Modena Performance resort to only slightly increasing the size of the intercoolers and directing a bit more air across them, rather than installing a large single intercooler across the entire front of the car. So my dirver to go down the water injection route is that I think it will yield more "bang for buck" (please excuse the Americanism) than changing out the intercoolers.

I don't think just installing water injection alone will increase power though. What I do think it will enable is greater inlet pressures to be run.

As I've hinted in my previous post, I think this winter I'll purchase the kit and get it installed while my car is off the road. Once the injection system is installed and running OK, I'll then start to slowly increase the boost pressure and see what happens!


Here's quite an interesting story of a mad baron who fitted an Aquamist system to a Maserati Qattroporte... it's quite inspiring I find!

Interesting brake...

I decided to take a closer look at the Brembo site and came up with the following...


Looking on the EurospareS site, I attained the Maserati part number for the front brake disk and cross referenced it with the Brembo product number... interestingly, if you then look up this part number on the Brembo site it returns the Maserati Shamal disc, which means that the Shamal and the MY92-93 Ghibli shares the same front discs!

New brakes for Jonny's Maserati?

Now that the wheels are sorted on the Ghibli, it's time to start looking for new brakes! After doing some initial research, I'm not suprised to find that there appears to be no off-the-shelf upgrade kit for the MY92 Ghibli, although there are kits for the MY94 and later cars. So again, this is going to mean having something custom made, or at least having an adapter made so that an MY94 Ghibli kit (or maybe even the 3200 GT kit since I now have 18" wheels) can be fitted to my car.


The brakes that I'm after are these Tarox 10 pots. The ones pictured here have a 330mm diamter disc, but I might be able to install 350mm discs behind my new wheels. This would transform the braking capability of the car enormously!

If you do any research on the Ghibli (Enrico's pages are a good start) then it soon becomes apparent that Maserati recognised that the brakes were a weak point in the design of the car. Every time they bought out a new version of the car then they upgraded the brakes. Fitting larger wheels to the later cars was probably driven as much by the desire for increased braking performance as it was the ground clearance problem. Also, if you look at pictures of the Ghibli Cup racing cars, you'll notice that lots of ducting hose was installed on the cars to improve cooling of the brakes... on the Ghibli Cup Evoluzione cars they brought out a new front bumber/spoiler to facilitate routing more air to the larger brakes.

So the idea is to fit larger, more efficient brakes. If the brakes are more efficient, then for daily use they shouldn't run as hot and therefore should be more effective and not fade under heavy breaking. An alternative of course would be to fit some carbon breakes, which actually work better the hotter they run! But they're a bit expensive and I think a bit wasted off the track? But I should be honest and say that the upgrade is also for aesthetics, since the original brakes look terribly inadequate behind the new wheels.

So... where to get an adapter made? Modena Performance along to the rescue! This German company that specialises in tuning Maserati cars has accepted the challenge to design and manufacture an adapter for my car so as to enable their Tarox brake kit to be installed. Initially, they wanted to keep my car for a few days in order to get the dimensions off it and check clearances, but this is not practical since it's a 5 hour drive to their workshop. However, they've agreed that they may be able to carry out the work if I send them one of my front wheels.

So, assuming the price is right, I'll plan on sending them a wheel in the winter when I've taken the car off the road to avoid the salt. With the car off the road, I might get round to fitting that Aquamist kit too!

New wheels for Jonny's Maserati

After a long wait to have the wheels finished to my Ghibli's peculiar specifications and then another wait before finding out the tires that I originally wanted were not available... and then another wait while I got my holy throttle body fixed... I finally got to fit my new wheels!


I have to admit to being a little nervous when I turned up at Korst Banden. Despite doing lots of thorough research to determine the existing wheels specifications and getting a good idea about what will fit in the Ghibli's wheel arches, listening to the guys at Korst express doubts that the tires I wanted to fit wouldn't... well... fit, I did start to doubt myself! So I was extremely happy when first a rear wheel fitted OK and then the tighter fitting front wheel slotted in OK.

Once the right side wheels were fitted, we went for a quick drive to check that the wheels weren't fouling in the arches when turning and driving over speed bumps. We didn't hear a thing... so success! Everything had turned out as planned!


All four wheels were then properly fitted, with the wheels balanced and installed with new bolts. Once the wheels were all fitted, the young mechanic who carried out the fitting joined me for a quick spin on the motorway, just to check that everything was fine.

I'm happy to report that it is... and that he was very impressed with the car. He was quite categoric in stating that the Ghibli was the quickest car he'd been in. He has a marker on the motorway where he checks the speed after accellerating hard off the slip road... and despite the wet road surface, he claimed the speed that I achieved at the marker was quicker than any of the Subaru Imprezas that he'd been a passenger in. So that made me happy!


I'm really happy with the new wheels. I purchased them predominantly for functional reasons... to increase the ground clearance of the car. However, I think the aesthetics of the car have improved with the new wheels. I like the way that the wheels fill the arches now and I think the proportions of the car are less slender and a bit more chunky, giving the car a more aggressive look. The ground clearance has certainly improved... I can now get over speed bumps without the underside fouling. I'm even tempted to consider some new springs to lower the car slightly!

Handling does not seem to have been adversely effected. I think traction has been improved, since I was not getting any rear wheel slipping on hard accelleration. I think the new Toyo tires are slightly better than the previous ones I had in the wet... since they were holding traction on the damp road on the drive home.

If I were to get some new wheels, or perhaps as advice to anyone else who goes down this route, I'd probably be a bit more adventurous on the offset on the rear wheels. It's now much better than before, with the wheel much more flush with the body, but there's still scope to push it out a little further. On the front however, I think it's looking OK.

Next project is to source some replacement brakes. The OEM discs look a little skimpy behind the new wheels, so I need to investigate getting some 330mm or even 350mm discs fitted. Seems that Modena Performance in Germany might be able to help me out.

Another Ghibli video

CarAreOK.com Maserati Ghibli


I was having a look through the Dutch Maserati Club notice board and saw a link to this video. I thought it looked quite interesting...

Ghibli tested OK

I picked the Ghibli up from Jorrit at Auto Forza late Friday afternoon. As usual, we spent an hour or two chatting about our favourite topic... cars. We eventually got 'round to the subject of my Ghibli and he started to ask some questions about the new intake system I'd fitted.

The thing I like about Jorrit is that he's a genuine enthusiast and always concerned about doing things properly. So the first thing he asked me was whether the hose joiners I'd used had the proper profile to prevent the hoses from slipping off. Ahhh... sweet!

From previous conversations that I've had with Jorrit, I know that he's not a huge fan of aftermarket race filters since he believes that they let through more particles than the OEM paper filters. He bases this on the observation that he sees more junk in the engines of cars fitted with aftermarket filters. I was therefore quite suprised with his enthusiasm regarding my latest upgrade. He'd taken the car for a drive and wanted to test out the accelleration and brakes. He seems to be quite impressed with the results, stating that the car feels quicker than a new Ghibli and one of the hardest accellerating Ghiblis he's driven. Given that the last time he drove the car he thought it was a bit flat and not driving so well, this is quite a turn around! He also said that he thought it was very torquey, that it pulls from much lower down the rev range than a normal Ghibli, which finally convinced him that swapping the turbos for the 3200 GT ones was a good idea.

I explained to him why I'd changed out the inlet tubing and when I said that one of the nice bi-products was the interesting noise it makes when lifting off the throttle, he grinned and agreed, saying that there's quite a few people who can confirm that since he tested it out in quite a busy area... he said a lot of people turned around and had a good look.

Although the car was performing pretty decently the last time I drove it when it was working OK, I was still a bit suprised at how enthusiastic Jorrit was being, so I was pretty keen to give it a drive. Unfortunately, it was pissing it down with rain on the drive home, plus it was rush hour so the traffic was averaging about 20 km/h. I'm a bit reluctant to say too much until I've taken the car back to the dyno, but... it seems to be performing even better now! It may be the result of the big service, with the timing reset and everything running a bit tighter, but I have a sneaky suspicion that I might have been running on only 1 turbo for a while. The car is now pulling really hard from as low as 3000 rpm and the really strange difference I noticed is that when I back off the throttle, I hear both pop off valves blow with a slight delay between the two... so I hear "pst, pst" instead of one "pssst". The spool up of the turbos is now also much more audible... I can really hear the bearings race up, much louder than they were before. I think this might be because it was the left hand one that wasn't working and now that it is I can hear it much more clearly on the drivers side (since my wife says that she's always heard it on the passenger side). There really is a philharmonic orchestra performing under the bonnet now... although I had the radio fixed (Jorrit installed a neat little new aerial) I turned it off and just listened to the engine working... it had me grinning all the way home! I'll have to see if I can record and post a video of it, since it's hard to describe. On pushing the throttle, you can hear the turbos start whirring and whistling as they spool up and then when you change gear you hear a combination of engine roar and a distinctive double blow off noise. I think passengers in the car will be as intrigued by the noises as they will be impressed by the accelleration.

I need to reset the E-Boost again now... Jorrit's tinkering has resulted in the boost pressure increasing up to 1.24 bar (I had it set at about 1.19 bar before) so that implies that something is working better! I'll call Rica on Monday and arrange another trip to the dyno. I'm interested to see if we can get the car performing better, since the emissions appear to be back under control, with the car now through the road worthiness test. Hopefully now we can get the car running a little less rich.

First thing though is getting the new wheels fitted... I've an appointment arranged for Tuesday afternoon. I hope that all goes to plan!

Ghibli through first big service

I spoke with Jorrit this afternoon and the Ghibli is through its first big service! Jorrit had systematically been through my list of actions and sorted most of them out for me.

• The windscreen washer nozzle is now pointing in the right direction.
• He's left the fuel pump since he thinks it's OK... it is indeed making a noise but he think it sounds OK.
• He's fixed the switch for the courtesy light in the boot.
• He's performed the big service, changing out the timing chains and resetting all the clearances and timing.
• He checked the Lambda probe and confirmed that it's working OK (as we observed on the rolling road a couple of weeks back).
• He's going to order some lamps to fit to the buttons on the center console after he confirmed they don't illuminate at night... he worked on my car 'til midnight last night and probably drove home in it... think he's feeling a bit guilty about making me wait so long for the service!
• He's going to fit a new aerial so that I can receive radio signals!
• He's tightened up the alternator belt, so hopefully no more squealing!
• He's told me to hold off trying to remove the leaf from the A/C ducting, since apparently this involves removing the dashboard. He's advised to try and ignore it for a while and see if it works it's way out.
• He fitted a new volt meter, thinking that the original one was faulty. Turns out that this did not solve the problem. It was instead caused by some short circuiting at the back of the instrument cluster; he re-soldered some of the connections and tightened things up a bit and it appears that this has sorted the problem!
• He oiled the clutch pedal , despite not being able to get it to squack.
• He's fixed the handbrake and tested it on his brake testing machine... he reports that I now have a very good hand brake!

You'll remember that while last at the dyno, we discovered a hole in the throttle body which we thought was the cause of the lost boost pressure. Well, turns out that it wasn't! After changing out the throttle body (he agreed that it was worth changing given the circumstances), the lack of boost pressure persisted and he tracked down the cause to a disconnected wastegate control hose... it had apprently popped off somehow. He re-fitted it and reported the boost pressure now up to 1.23 bar (so I need to get the boost controller reset again!).

While testing out the car, he tried out the brakes (by braking really hard) and thinks that they're not quite up to scratch. He says they're looking a bit blue which is probably an indication that they're getting too hot and fading. So I need to start looking into a new brake system I think... although I think the cause is that I simply don't use the car enough and that the brake discs are oxidising which is making them perform badly.

He also checked out the CO emisions. Seems that the catalyst on the right hand side is not 100% since CO on the left bank reads 0.25% (which is below the maximum 0.3% for my EURO2 car), but on the right hand side it reads 0.46%, which is obviously over (this is at 3,000 rpm). Seems at some point a new catalyst will be required.

If all goes to plan then I should be able to pick up the car tomorrow and hopefully get the long awaited new wheels next week!

More bits delivered

Yesterday I received the windscreen washer bottle part that I ordered from EurospareS as described in a previous post.

The part came well packaged in protective bubble wrapping and a plastic envelope and is a genuine Maserati part... so I'm pretty pleased witht he purchase!

Will fit the part when I get the car back from the garage, hopefully this weekend!

Car in safe hands?

I dropped the Ghibli off at Auto Forza this morning, taking it very easy so as not to aggrevate the holy throttle body any further (but still leaving the wife standing at the traffic lights (driving the Volvo), despite short shifting and the wet road conditions).

Since it was early, Jorrit was not around when I dropped the car off, but I called him this afternoon to confirm that he got the keys and that the car was OK. He'd just come back from his holidays and was describing to me how his turbo (he's got an Alfa) had blown up 300 km before arriving home. Fortunately, the car still managed to make it back to his house, albeit with a decent amount of smoke coming out of the exhaust.

I informed him that I hadn't had time to fit the replacement throttle body and he gave a chuckle before telling me that it was only a 10 minute job... I explained to him that it would probably take me about an hour.

So, the car should be ready maybe at the end of the week, but most likely the beginning of next week...