Jonny's Ghibli Valued!

The nice folks at Kröller insurance here in the Netherlands have agreed to insure my car as an old-timer after I made them aware of a quote from one of their competitors. This is good news for me since it will more than half the cost of the yearly insurance premium!

In order to calculate the new premium, the insurance company requested that I have the car inspected and valued by an independent assessor. So on Monday I met up with Rob from Hofkamp Projects. I received his report yesterday, in which he marked the overal condition of the car as 8.5 out of 10 and gave the car an insurance value of €22,000. This is higher than I anticipated since the market value of the car is probably more like €15,000, but he included the value of the modifications made to the car, so the indicated value is what he thinks it would cost to replace the car.

So, nice to see a high value for the car, but not so good for the insurance premium calculation!

Updated Fuel Economy

Another year or so has passed so I thought it was about time to update the fuel economy chart for the Ghibli (and empty the glove box of petrol station receipts!).


As you can see, the car is returning an average of 6.8 km/liter, which according to an online converter is equivalent to an American 16 mpg or a British 19 mpg, which is pretty awful for a 2.0 liter car, but great fun though!

Summer fun

After spending a couple of weeks in Syria at the start of the month, it was great to get back home and have the opportunity to drive to work everyday in the Ghibli. Without fail, I step out of the car with a big grin on my face and I'm simply loving driving it!

Following on from the discoveries in my last post, I've trimmed back the sensitivity setting on the E-Boost controller and voila... the stuttering during hard acceleration has stopped! I've now increased the gain setting slightly to compensate and to set the boost pressure right at the end of the amber section on the dash boost gauge (I need to check but this should be just over 1.20 bar).

I'm also now slowly increasing the gate pressure setting, which is the pressure at which the controller starts to open the wastegates. It's currently set at 1.05 bar, but in third gear at least there's scope to increase this. Since my 3200 GT turbos don't spool up very quickly, there's less risk of over boost so the gate pressure can be set reasonably close to the desired boost pressure.

I'm really happy with the way that the car is performing now. Acceleration is nice and steady, with a kick in the arse coming around 4000 rpm. Keep the revs below this and the car is very civilised, above this and its nice and aggressive with a quick throttle response.

The warm weather is testing the new oil cooler. Now that I'm driving it more I'm noticing how it performs. It's obvious that when being driven with decent speed, the oil temp is being kept pretty low as the water temp is maintained below 80 deg C and the oil pressure stays just below 5 bar.

Slowing down or stopping when driving through town, the water temp is elevated and stays between 80-90 deg C with the fan coming on alot. Also, the oil pressure drops to 2.5 bar. But as soon as you get some speed up and get air flowing across the radiator, the temp is straight back below 80 deg C and the oil pressure to just below 5 bar.

So my conclusion is that the oil cooler is working well. It has no problem keeping the oil temp low when driving at speed (with good flow across the radiator) and it manages to take the edge off the heat when the car is stationary, which is where the problems occurred on the track.

There's some noticeable additional load on the engine at idle though, particularly when the engine is cold. It's only small, but the engine is more prone to stalling now and a dab of revs is required to prevent stall when reversing with full steering lock. I will get this sorted though when the car is dropped off at the garge next week end... the idle needs setting a fraction higher I think.

The car is going for the annual APK (road test) next weekend and also to have a few things done:

1. Re-fit the original distributor; it was replaced with a new one to check whether this was the cause of the stuttering, but since it isn't then the original can be refitted.
2. The volt meter has stopped working completely, so the wiring needs to be checked.
3. The idle needs resetting.
4. Maybe fit the new springs. I'm in two minds about this though as the ground clearance around town is good at the moment.
5. See if it's possible to modify the left wheel arch to increase the clearance a little and prevent the tire from rubbing on fast or tight right hand corners.
6. Perform small service (oil change).

I'll try and capture some log data to show the changes in the boost pressure... I expect that the boost curve will be much flatter now at the top end instead of oscillating up and down. I think the top end is now performing much better as a result. Feels like the car is back at 330 hp, but I'd need to take it back onto the dyno to check this...

Water plumbing for Laminova oil cooler

I was asked last week to show some more details of how to connect up the Mocal Laminova oil cooler to the water side of the Ghibli's engine. Well, hopefully this hand sketch I made will help?

Engine Inlet Temperature

Looking through the visitor stats for this site, it seems that lots of people are interested in upgrading the intercoolers on the Ghibli. I have to admit that this is something that I looked into myself, since the stock air/air coolers seem a bit small compared with the huge aftermarket coolers that can be purchased for the likes of VW Golfs and Mitsubishi Evos.

So, I pulled up one of the data logs from my PLX Devices R-500, since I have it tapped into the air temperature sensor on the throttle body. This sensor measures the temperature of the charge air entering the engine, after it has been cooled by the intercooler. I have to admit that I expected the temperature to be in the range of 70 to 90 degrees since after going for an enthusiastic drive, the throttle body and plenum chamber are too hot to keep my finger on.


The picture above is a screen grab of the PLX Logger software charting the data in 2D. It's a bit rough... I've been having trouble getting reliable RPM data from the engine speed tap and so this needs to be multiplied by 5 to give the correct engine speed (I think I'm going to tap into one of the ignition timing wires instead). The MAP values are also a little bit out. However, the chart gives a good enough idea of what's happening and the temperature values are correct.

What you see is that at idle, when the car is stationary and no cooling air is flowing across the intercoolers, the inlet temperature is up around 50 degrees Centigrade. It's important to realise that the ambient temperature when these reading were taken was around 5 degrees Centigrade, so pretty cool. As soon as the car starts moving, the inlet temperature rapidly starts to decrease to a steady state around 30 degrees above the ambient temperature. When the car is driven hard at around 380 seconds, there are significant peaks in the inlet temperature. The temperature is quick to fall back to a steady state less than 40 degrees Centigrade.

I still need to capture some log data for summer temperature, but I suspect that steady state with an ambient temperature around 30 degrees Centigrade will be about 70 degrees Centigrade. This is less than I expected and my conclusion from this is that, unless the car is going to be raced on a track where the engine is kept at full load for a long time, then there's no huge benefit to changing out the stock intercoolers if the car is being run with 1.20 barg inlet pressure. Bear in mind that if the car is run on the track, there will be a good flow of air all the time over the intercoolers helping to keep them cool. The highest inlet temperatures are occurring when the car is stationary or moving slowly and increasing the intercooler size is not going to help this.

What I'm therefore thinking of doing is adding a cooling fan behind each intercooler, connected to the water radiator cooling fans. These fans generally only activate when the car is moving slowly or stationary so would be a good control for the intercooler fans. This should then keep the intercoolers at a relatively low temperature when driving around town for example, or when the car is cooling down after a hard drive.

It's official... the Ghibli is a classic

It feels like I've been neglecting the Ghibli of late, since I've not spent much time or effort on it recently. So in an attempt to make amends, I've spent most of the weekend giving the car a good clean an a thorough polish and to prove it I took some pictures!

Jonny's Polished Maserati Ghibli

While in the process, I had several neighbours and passers by comment on the car and pass on positive comments regarding the car and the condition, which is always nice to hear and a real charm of owning the car. Two of the passers by commented that the car is a collectors item and a rare classic... so there you have it! It's official... you can't argue with the word on the street!

Anyway, apologies for being so quiet... despite there having been plenty of stuff going on in my life recently, non of it has really revolved around the car, other than the Spax lowering springs that I ordered from the UK have arrived, which I'll get Jorrit to fit next time I take the car to Nordwijkerhout (probably in a month or so).

Mocal Laminova oil cooler fitted

While away on holiday this week, I asked Jorrit at Auto Forza if he could install the oil cooler I purchased a few weeks back, along with the take off plate and remote filter mount that I ordered with the cooler.

The inspiration for this upgrade came from Bob (staatsof) on the BiturboZentrum forum, who recently fitted this cooler on his track Ghibli Open Cup and kindly shared pictures of the fitting to the forum members. I was already looking to fit an oil cooler after my experience on the Assen TT track last year where my oil overheated when the car was stationary after completing a couple of hard laps. However, I was looking at installing a conventional oil/air cooler and hadn't considered fitting a oil/water cooler, but after reading Bob's comments it made perfect sense for my application.

The Mocal Laminova oil/water cooler is a heat exchanger that flows oil through the centre of a core and water around the core. The oil is pumped via the oil pump on the engine block and water comes from the engine cooling water system. What makes the system so good for me is that the cooling water quickly warms up to about 60 degrees centigrade in the engine block before it then starts to circulate through the engine radiator. It is at this point that it starts to circulate through the oil cooler and initially it actually warms up the engine oil, meaning that it actually helps warm up the engine quicker. The quicker the engine warms up, the less likely you are to over-stress it. Therefore, when the oil is cooler than the water, it actually helps keep the water temperature down and there's less need for the radiator fans to kick in.

I like the idea of the entire engine block running at an even temperature, rather than having hot spots where different fluid circuits are flowing.



The installation of the cooler went really well. Rather than try and explain this, I've posted a load of pictures with lengthy descriptions that should make it all clear. The installation looks pretty professional, although as Jorrit pointed out, probably four too many tie-wraps used to get away with it looking like a Maserati fitted system.

I've not had the opportunity to give the car a good drive yet, but on the way home I did notice that the engine temperature was running a bit lower than normal, with the water temperature not getting above 80 degrees on the gauge and only once did I hear the fan come on when I was stationary in town. So it appears that in normal use, the oil is actually cooling the water! This is a good thing, since it likely means that the oil before wasn't really getting up to its optimum temperature with normal driving.

One thing I learnt is that my Ghibli (the first non-ABS variant) has a slightly unique sump. The reason it didn't have a cooler is because the sump on my car is a little taller than previous Bi-turbos to provide for a bit more air cooling. But it turned out that the reduced ground clearance led to leaking sumps from the increased abrasion with the road, which is why Maserati went back to the shallow sump and fitted an oil cooler to give the required cooling. Since my car has the taller sump plus an oil cooler, I shouldn't get any problems with cooling now. However, I will be fitting the shallower sump as soon as I get a leak on the current one, since I wish to drop the height of my car a little, but the clearance is a little tight as it is.


I had a couple of other things changed while the car was with Jorrit. The front bushings had worn out and I was getting some play when I pressed the brakes, which wasn't very confidence inspiring. So I had the bushings upgraded to the later Ghibli GT design. The consumable rubbers for these bushings are much cheaper than my original ones so I should recover the cost in the long run. The car's feeling much better to drive now though, much stiffer and less creaky at the front.


Also, still trying to figure out the cause of the stuttering problem, I asked Jorrit to fit a known good distributor to my car to see if this is the cause. He did so and I initially thought that the problem was solved on my drive home until I managed to induce a stutter again by accelerating hard in third gear. It only happened once though so I need to do a few more miles to be conclusive.

Next on the agenda is repairing or replacing the radiator as it has started to leak and it seems to be getting worse. Jorrit knows some guys who can refurbish the existing radiator, essentially by fitting a new core, but this could be an opportunity to install a new aluminium one?

Rubber Update

Following on from my last post, I've explored a few options and spoke with Jorrit at Auto Forza who's been aware of this issue for a while and has been on the look out for a solution.

It seems that Maserati made an adapter kit for the non-ABS Ghibli in order to fit the later designed package from the GT variant. I also discovered that the design of the ABS and the subsequent GT cars are both different, which surprised me.

Fortuitously, Jorrit came across a Ghibli non-ABS subframe fitted with the adapter rings to fit the new parts from a GT car. Since he suspects that the second hand subframe is not completely straight, he's going to remove the adapters from this and fit them onto my good subframe and then order parts 1 to 7 in the drawing below. Since the rubbers from this GT group are cheap, I'll order a spare couple and take some measurements from these and try and get an equivalent poly part sourced.


This set up should make the front of my car feel stiffer and should help prevent rubbing my tires against the wheel arch when I corner hard. Talking of which, I checked my front tire size to jog my memory and indeed I fitted a pair of 225x40 tires on the front. Next time I'll fit some 225x35 which should prevent future rubbing... I went with the larger wall height to try and raise the front of the car a bit, but I think 40 was a little excessive in hindsight.

So, I'll be booking my car in with Jorrit shortly to do the following:

1. Upgrade the front bushings to GT spec.
2. Fit the Mocal oil/water heat exchanger.
3. Replace the pin in the driver's side door hinge.
4. Measure up the exhaust so that I can order some catalysts.

Hopefully I can get this sorted next week and ready for a drive to Mosel in Germany at the end of the month!

Rubber Pads

My car is getting to the age where the rubber parts are needing replacement. Unfortunately, some of these parts are becoming increasingly difficult to source.


The latest parts requiring replacement are part of the suspension set-up and are labelled number 45 in the drawing above and Maserati refer to them as RUBBER PAD Part No. 396650021. The effect of these wearing is primarily felt when braking... the front suspension feels to move a little before, which can be a little un-nerving!

It seems that the non-ABS Ghibli was the only Maserati fitted with these parts, since the group of parts were changed for the ABS and later variants. Although the drawing looks identical for the 2.24v, it has a different part number (BUFFER Part No. 316620110 (Supercedes To Part No. 396650110)).

If the part I need is no longer available, I have a couple of options. First, I need to check whether the 2.24v part and the Ghibli part is actually physically different. If they're the same then I can just get one of those. Another alternative is to upgrade to the ABS parts, but this may not be straight forward and may require changing out some other components such as the subframe, which will turn out to be expensive. Another alternative is to fit some polyurethane generic replacement from Powerflex and then machine some adapter spacers. At least these generic parts will be easier to source in future plus they're stiffer and much tougher wearing, so shouldn't require replacing as frequently!

Blow Off Valves on Shamal

I'm starting to wish that I'd arranged some sort of royalty deal with Forge now... only kidding, since it's great to see people adopting these valves for their Maserati Bi-turbos. They're now making their debut on the superb V8 engine Shamal that you can see pictured above.

Thanks for the picture Mark!

Potential Catalyst Source

I've been keeping an eye open to see if I can find a catalyst that I can use in my cat-less front section. At the moment, I need to replace the entire front section with one fitted with cats when driving on the road (ahem), which involves disconnecting and re-connecting the Exhaust Gas Temperature and lambda sensors.

This is obviously a bit of a hassle, so I've been wanting to find a suitable catalyst that I can install into my de-cat section, so I only have to install or remove the cat and not the entire front section. Well, looks like I might have found something...


It's made in the UK by EEC and the price doesn't seem too bad. I just need to get under my car and measure up my exhaust and beneath the car to get a feel for if it will fit. Looks promising though.

It's not the MAP sensor

On Saturday I put the inside of my car back together (the passenger side foot well has been a mess while I've been installing the PLX R-500) in preparation for my drive to the UK this week. After doing so, I went for a drive to check that everything was connected properly and working.

Despite the boost only getting up to 1.10 bar, I'm still getting a stutter when I accellerate full throttle in third gear. However, the stutter did come later in the rev range. So, this really rules out the MAP sensor and I'm back to trying to find the cause of my problem.

It has to be somethingon the control side of the engine... I suspect it's the ignition timing but to be honest I think it could be anything on the ECU side. I think it's going to be extremely difficult to track this down and this lends more weight to me installing a new ECU, if only to be able to get a better insight into what's happening in the engine. So, I could be installing that Haltech ECU sooner rather than later, depending on how Jarle in Norway gets on with finishing his Haltech installation in his bi-turbo over the next few weeks...

Oil cooler and MAP

Well, I finally ordered the Laminova oil cooler, take off plate and remote oil filter parts from Think Automotive last week and they arrived ready for me to pick up on my trip to the UK next week. When I'm back I'll book the car in with Jorrit at Auto Forza and ask him to fit it all for me along with some custom length hoses. I'd do it myself, but I just don't have the facilities unfortunately.

Also, I think I've figured out the cause of my stutter and drop off in performance around 4000 rpm. Contrary to what I thought, the MAP sensor in my non-ABS Ghibli is the Marelli APS-03 sensor (where as I thought it was an 06 sensor). As you can see from this link, the APS-03 sensor only reads up to 2.16 bar absolute pressure, which is exactly the pressure in my plenum chamber when the car gives a stutter. So I think it's reasonable to assume that the ECU in my car is designed to set the timing "safe" when the MAP sensor reading goes out of range.

I've set the maximum inlet pressure down to just below 1.16 bar gauge pressure now, but I haven't been for a drive yet to see how it performs. But I'll be doing a lot of driving next week since I'm planning on taking the car over to the UK on the ferry, so I can get a feel for how it's performing then.

No other news other than I gave the car a wash the other weekend... it was filthy and I needed four buckets of water to clean it!

Preparing for the spring

A few weeks back, I received an email from an old friend who was asking whether I'd be interested in joining him for a drive down to Germany and onto the Nürburgring. Of course, I'd love to, but after my last experience on the track I really need to install some oil cooling before venturing back.

I've therefore been researching into oil cooling. Initially, I was looking into fitting an efficient air cooler and locating it in front of the engine cooling radiator, in a similar fashion to the Modena performance air/oil cooler pictured here (from Enrico's Maserati pages). It's the large silver coloured one in the centre. I actually think this cooler is a bit over the top, since an efficient cooler of half this size should be sufficient, although I think this Modena prepared car is awaiting a V8 engine conversion. Also, I don't think it's very efficient mounting the cooler with such a large gap between the rear of the cooler and the front of the water radiator, since the exhaust flow from the oil cooler will not flow nicely through the radiator.

So, I was researching into fitting an sandwich adapter between the oil pump and the oil filter to facilitate fitting hoses to the front mounted oil cooler and had managed to source a second hand Maserati part with built in thermostat, pictured here. This little device only sends oil to the cooler after it has reached a certain temperature (around 80 degrees C) in order to warm the oil up to operating temperature as quickly as possible, otherwise the oil will be too cool and hence quite viscous.

While discussing my options with the Bi-turbo forum on Yahoo, one of the members talked about the oil/water cooler he has fitted to his Maserati Ghibli Cup and subsequently sent some pictures of the cooler fitted to his car. After researching the cooler (it's a Mocal Laminova cooler), the benefits, particularly for my application, were clear.

A water/oil cooler does not need a thermostat and warms the oil up to operating temperature much quicker than an air/oil cooler. This is because the water/oil cooler is actually a heat exchanger and the water cooling is very effective at taking heating from the engine and therefore warms up quickly. The water/oil cooler then transfers this heat into the oil, hence warming it up quickly. I often drive drive reasonably short journeys in my car (twenty minutes) which is only just long enough to get the engine properly warmed up. Therefore, anything I can do to warm it up quicker is certainly a bonus.

Although the water warms up the oil quickly, the water cooling on the Ghibli is very effective at maintaining the water temperature at around 90 degrees C, even in extreme use. The idea of the water/oil cooler is that the fluid temperatures of the oil and water remain about the same, which means that the oil temperature should be maintained around 90 degrees, which is about perfect!

In order to fit the water/oil cooler, I'll have to fit a remote oil filter and an adapter plate to the oil pump to facilitate running lines to the remote filter. The cooler itself will be mounted behind the water radiator, spliced into the line that takes cool water from the radiator back into the engine block. In the drawing, this will mean rotating part 34 clockwise about 90 degrees, fitting in the Mocal cooler, then installing a new 90 degree elbow to face upwards, then installing part 6 (will have to flip it round) up and into part 5, which will have to be rotated 90 degrees anti-clockwise.

The parts are made by Think Auto in the UK, who are not proving to be the most effective with e-mail correspondence. However, I have managed to get a quote off them for the parts I require... the water Laminova is not cheap, but the other parts are pretty reasonable and Jorrit at Auto Forza can get all the hose and fittings tailor made for me.

I'm hoping to get it installed within the next couple of months.

Squeaky brakes

I was just looking through my photos and came across this video of Jorrit driving my car back from a test ride. It's only a short one, but I think Ghiblis look much nicer on the move than they do in photos and it gives a much better feel for the proportions of the car.



The front brakes squeak a bit... but I'll let them off given how well they perform! I'm tempted to fit some new springs and lower the car a bit though...