Several months ago, I was pitched the idea that the New England Region of the Ferrari Club of America wanted to have Francois Sicard at the guest of honor at the 2026 Annual Meet to be held in Monticello NY. I wasn’t sure why Chris Graves, the Co-Chairman of the Event was asking me until I realized they wanted me to pitch the idea to Francois! I went to Francois’ shop and explained what the FCA wanted to do, and he simply asked, “what do I have to do?” I told him nothing except show up! From that point forward, I decided I would do whatever in my power to make this event a wonderful celebration of my mentor, and mechanics throughout the Ferrari Community.

I curated a collection of cars that Francois worked on, including my 330 America which started it all for me in Vintage Ferraris. I invited cars that Francois and his race team at NART and Chinetti Motors built. I arranged for some of Francois’ oldest friends and customers to come join us for the Concours, and a Banquet honoring Francois. I even had my car detailed before driving the two hours to Monticello this past week for the celebrations!

Driving my 330 America was imperative because if I didn’t drive my car, how was I supposed to preach that “Ferraris were meant to be driven?” I, however, had several other cars shipped to Monticello so we could gather them in honor of Francois.

The New York and New England Chapter published a wonderful book highlighting the career of Francois telling the story of Francois’ mentor Nereo Iori from who he met at The Factory. I even got a mention as Francois’ apprentice keeping the tradition of master to apprentice alive!

Brian Crall kicked off the four days of Ferrari content with a Concours seminar going over the specific details of a 1989 Ferrari 328.

One car I was excited to see was this 1974 BBLM. Francois and the NART Team at Chinetti Motors built this car from a stripped down street car The Ferrari Factory sent to the States for NART to race. I personally invited the owner to bring the car to honor Francois, but here were strings to pull, and egos to stow, but I was so glad to see this car in Monticello.

Three of the original builders involved with this car were present, so it was great to reunite them with the car. Pictured here is Bob Coats, owner; Dick Fritz, NART Team Manager; Francois Sicard, NART Chief Mechanic; Bob Craige, NART Mechanic.

Another car I was happy to see at the Concours was this 1951 Ghia Bodied 212. Francois worked on this car when it was owned by David Letterman, and was recently offered at auction. The current owner brought it to me to correct some things, and wanted to bring it to this event. It was a joint effort between several shops along with the owner himself spending some late nights getting this car ready in time for this Concours. All the hard work paid off when he received a gold award for his efforts!

Despite a long day in the sun at the Concours, I booked reservation for dinner in Monticello at an Italian Restaurant. Monticello is in a rural part of NY, so there aren’t a lot of choices, especially for a group of 12 people, but I was pleasantly surprised, however, with the Colosseo Family Restaurant. I had concerns with how it looked on the outside, but as the food arrived cordially and efficiently, I was relieved!

Maybe we were used to our urban prices for entrees, but the servings were really family sized. Clete barely managed to eat a quarter of his ziti before he has to ask for help!

I was really busy this week, but it was so nice to spend some time with some Vintage Ferrari folks.

It was great to see old friends reconnect with Francois back at the Resorts Hotel. Here’s Greg Jones and Parker Hall stopping by Francois’ table to say hello. Even Claude chirped a welcome while perched on Francois’ shoulder! (The Frenchman managed to escape poop free!)

There were a couple of rallies and Track Days at the Monticello Motor club, but the weather started warming towards the later part of the week. I needed to load the cars I was caring for back onto a truck and back to my shop, and decided to drive my 330 America home to beat some of the heat. Parker Hall decided to ride shotgun in the Ferrari and I took him to one of my local ice cream joints to sample the local dairy!

The four day event wrapped up with a Banquet to give out the major awards for the Ferraris that showed at the Concours, and to celebrate the Guest of Honor. I was worried in the lead up to this event that Francois would not enjoy himself, or that he would meet someone he didn’t like, but my fears were unfounded as he seemed to be truly enjoying himself! Here are long time friends Judy Stropus and Wayne Carini sitting with Francois’ wife Pam posing for a picture.

Joe Colaseco and Larry Aurriana brought the whole Aurriana Race Team to honor Francois. In the last couple decades, this team has competed and won several Vintage Races all over the world from Monaco to Goodwood. If there was ever a reason not to retire, Francois has been part of this winning team that never seems to slow down!

It was so rewarding to see Francois and Pam so happy. It would be an understatement if I said Francois changed my life, so I was so honored to be a part of this celebration of his career through the Ferrari Club of America. Thanks to Chris Graves for the spark of an idea that grew into a special celebration of a man who embodies Ferrari. Forza Ferrari!

I’ve been sorting out some issues on a couple 330s at my shop that can help all owners of Vintage Ferraris. I’ve done these repairs before, but it’s always good to check your own car to make sure these things are working properly. One of them is to check the seal at the fuel filler cap. The original rubber seal is usually hard and cracked. The modern fuels seem to dissolve the original rubber material, and makes it hard. I usually dig this material out, and break it apart to replace it with something more compatible.

I have found using fuel safe cork gasket material available from the auto parts store to works well. It comes in 3/8 inch sheets, and I cut it with a hole in the middle small enough to slip behind the center retaining plate of the fuel filler cap.

One of the mechanical fuel pumps on the cars I was working one seemed not to be working efficiently, and on closer look, I noticed the pivot rod that actuates with the fuel pump was working its way out of the pump body. This hardened rod is supposed to be steaked in place and it looks like it was working its way out. After pushing the rod in place, I bench tested the pump, and it worked fine, so its lack of efficiency was due to the rod being out of place. I made sure the rod was secure and reinstalled the pump.

On the second 330 I’ve been working on, I noticed a couple of oil spots on the floor near the rear tire.

When I removed the knockoff, I noticed it was filled with gear oil which pointed to oil leaking from the rear axle somewhere.

After removing the caliper, and the rear hub, I found the back of the brake disc and hub to be dry. Usually, when the axle seal goes bad, oil will leak past the flange of the brake disc and sling oil out around the back of the brake disc, but everything here was dry.

With the disc removed, I could see the oil seal was soft and pliable, and doing its job, so oil was leaking from somewhere else.

The other source of the oil leak often comes from between the splines of the axle shaft and the washer that holds the wheel hub to the axle shaft. Oil will migrate past these splines and find it’s way into the hub.

Whenever I replace a seal in the rear hub, I always coat the back of the washer behind the axle nut, and it looks like the last guy didn’t do this, so I used some rtv that is supposed to gear oil resistant to seal the axle up and hopefully stop the leaking!

If you’re a regular visitor to this website, you probably noticed it has been offline for several days. My server that hosts this website was seeing a lot of traffic that was slowing things down. The traffic was not from people visiting, but rather Bots that scan the internet, scraping data for it’s various uses. Some of it is for marketing and advertising, and some of it is for AI training, but whatever it was, my service provider had to shut down my website until I could find time to stop the Bots! Luckily my friend Rich came to the rescue and helped block some of the traffic so the website could come back online, but this will probably happen again. It’s a cat and mouse game of blocking egregious Bots, and programmers figuring work arounds to keep launching more Bots.

I don’t want to permanently disable my website as I find the data it has amassed useful not only to myself, but anyone who wants Vintage Ferrari information, but I will need to figure a new procedure moving forward. Until then, know that I am fine and content is still being created on Youtube, Instagram, and Facebook, and hopefully this site will be back without too many drastic changes. Thanks to everyone’s concern and support!

I had an owner of the SI 330 contact me about his SI 330GT 2+2, and whether or not I had time to service the car. I’m pretty busy these days trying to keep up with all the work at the shop, along with launching a new car storage facility next door, but I told him I would always be willing to squeeze a tune up on a Vintage Ferrari so long as it didn’t need any major work.

What’s interesting was when I looked up the serial number on the car, I realized I had met this car over 20 years ago in a shop in Vermont! She was a black car back then, but most of everything else was what I remembered.

The interior was still the same vinyl but the owner is now thinking of returning it to leather.

She wasn’t running too well, and I found two issues working against her. The electric fuel pump was working intermittently, and the accelerator pumps weren’t squirting.

The electric fuel pump would have to wait for some rebuild parts, but I took a look at the fuel pump diaphragms, and they were pretty stiff. It looks like some of the internal passages leading to the diaphragms were clogged, allowing the rubber parts to harden and stop working. I had a set of new ones at my shop that I swapped them out so that I could get the car started and running to assess the rest of the engine.

After an initial test drive with an operating fuel system, I found the car performed fairly well. It still needed tuning and tweaking, but nothing jumped out that was horribly wrong. I discussed a plan with the owner, and I proceeded with the service on the engine which started with pulling the valve covers. The owner wanted me to inspect the valve train and make sure everything was fine.

What’s interesting was what I found with the valve adjusters. The most common adjuster screw has a rectangular shape and these have been available from all the parts suppliers for decades.

What I found was a few adjusters were square shaped, which were the original adjuster screws installed on Vintage Ferraris when they were new. I have not seen these adjusters except for original low mileage cars because after nearly 60 years, most of these adjusters have either been replaced during an engine rebuild, or replaced with new ones during routine valve adjustments. The mileage on this car would usually mean this car had a rebuild already, but why would it still have a couple original adjusters? Hmmmm…

Work continued on the 1951 Ferrari 212 I have at my shop. The owner and I are working on getting some of the details right, and deciding which way to pursue them.

There were some dents on the top of the radiator that the owner wanted to see if we could remove. It’s one of the first things you see when opening the hood. Ironically, most later Ferraris have a hood that opens forward, but on this particular car, the hood opens conventionally with the hinges at the cowl, so these dents are more obvious.

I had a Paintless Dent Removal guy come to the shop and take a look to see what he could do. He accessed the area through the filler neck of the radiator and was able to remove most of the dents. Unfortunately, some of the paint cracked on the radiator which was to be expected as paint on these surfaces are often not as well adhered.

After the PDR guy left, I masked and prepped the radiator for painting, planning to blend the paint as best as I could. Removing the radiator was an option, but due to the time constraints, I decided not to go there!

Other little details needed to be addressed if I were to make this 212 into a Platinum Show car, and one of them was the safety wire on the steering column. I’ve been dinged before for using stainless steel wire to secure the bolts on the steering shaft. Ferrari used black oxide mechanic’s wire to secure these bolts, and I changed this out. Some of you are probably rolling your eyes at this, but that’s the level we’re playing at with Platinum show cars!

This 212 has two mechanical fuel pumps feeding the engine while it’s running. I noticed it wouldn’t stay running when relying on the mechanical pumps, so I had to take a closer look.

One of the diaphragms was rock hard, and not moving fuel too well. These older diaphragms have a slot in the shaft that attaches to the fulcrum differently than the later designs I’m used to, but I figured out how to disassemble and reassemble the unit in short order.

The check valves were working fine once I replaced the seals, so the pumps were back doing their thing!

I had a 365GT 2+2 come into my shop for her annual service. It’s a car that I’ve had at my. shop several times before and even on some house calls whenever it only needed an oil change.

Here’s the YouTube video of the test drive after the valve adjustment and initial tune.

As I was reassembling the engine after the valve adjustment, I noticed the oil seal behind one of the pulleys was hard as rock, so now was the time to replace it. Everything stopped as I waited for this seal to arrive, but that’s the nature of working on old Ferraris!

As the ignition wires were being installed, I found a couple plug ends were cracked and the wires were pretty brittle. I have never changed these wires since I started taking care of this car, so who knows how old they were. These red wires are usually spiral wound wires to suppress EM interference in the electronic ignition boxes and radios, but are not as durable as the solid wires they replaced.

Late 365GT 2+2s changed their ignition systems from conventional points systems to an early capacitor discharge ignition box requiring these wires, but the ones available in the Ferrari market are usually made for the later cars, so they’re not exactly right.

I trimmed the new set to follow the original details of the old wires and reused some of the wire keepers to keep it looking original.

With the new wires installed the car was firing on all cylinders!

It was also time to change out the air filters as I don’t have any records of changing these out either! They were pretty dirty, and it was time.

Air filters can sometimes be tricky for Vintage Ferraris. The height, circumference, and size can change from the size of the housing, the type of carburetor, or the model of the car. Some Ferrari models kept the same air filter throughout the model run, while others changed mid model and made no changes in the catalog. The only way to be sure is to measure the filters and see if the new ones match. It would be easy to go down to my local auto parts store to buy filters, but they will inevitably ask for a year, make, and model, and soon discover the don’t have any parts in their system. If I know the parts store people they may let me go through their inventory looking for a filter that would fit, but that can be time consuming if we have no clue which boxes to start opening! I could spend an hour looking and turn up nothing.

I called my usual Ferrari parts supplier and they had two sizes available for a 365GT 2+2, and they were nice enough to go down to the warehouse and measure the two sizes to see which ones would fit. One of them seemed like the right one, and I had them send three of them to me. It would seem like an easy solution, but the heart ache was three filters cost about $600 dollars! I’m not sure what’s worse, paying me to look a little more for off the shelf filters at my local auto parts store, or simply pay the “Ferrari Tax!”

As work progressed on the interior of the blue 330GT we needed to fix some issues with the fiberglass center console panel. I don’t know anyone that likes to work with fiberglass unless you have a business set up for this kind of work. It’s not particularly hard, but it’s messy, smelly, and often makes you itch for at least a day if you’re not wearing proper PPE. My upholsterer was not volunteering to fix the piece, and I had the materials at my shop to do the work, so I here I am!

The old fiberglass had cracked and the openings to the electric window switches needed reinforcing.

While I was fixing the major holes and cracks, I resolved the cigarette lighter hole to more roundness, and reinforced some more cracks.

Some areas were thin and flexed with any pressure, and there were some bubbles in the original gel coat, so I filled and reinforced these areas with fiberglass fibers and gel.

I sanded everything smooth and took it back to the upholsterer for a leather cover.

I was working on a Ferrari 212 at my shop and saw a slight weeping of fuel out of the fuel tank. I cleaned the area up and gave it a few hours, and the seeping continued. Unfortunately, the right way to repair this leak was to remove the tank.

Having never removed a tank from a 212 before, it soon became obvious it needed to come out from inside the trunk, so all the panels and carpeting had to come out first.

The fuel sender was disconnected and I took out the sender to check if it was working properly and drained the tank.

The tank came out with relative ease and was ready to take to my gas tank repair guy who would see if he could solder up the leak.

Another leak I found was with one of the lever shocks. These Houdaille shocks were common in early Ferraris and even Ford Model As from the 30s! On closer inspection three out of the four shocks were leaking so I removed all four of them and sent them out for inspection and resealing.

While removing the shocks and sending photographs to the owner of the work, he noticed how the exhaust headers were looking a little crusty. Back when Francois was restoring this car, high temperature exhaust paint was the usual finish applied to the headers, but it quickly burns off. I coated my headers on the 330 America about 25 years ago with a new high temp ceramic coating that still looks new to this day. Today, high temp ceramic exhaust coatings are widely available, and can be done locally instead of shipping across the country.

I removed the headers and hand delivered them to the coating vendor instead of risking shipping these bulky and awkward pieces in the mail.

I had a set of headers I wanted to send out for high temp ceramic coating. It’s a process that I highly recommend as I coated the exhaust headers on my 330 America over 25 years ago, and they still look like they were done yesterday. Years ago, the only place that offered this service was Jet-Hot, and I had to package the headers, ship them out, and wait for their return. Today, there are shops that offer this process locally, and I have one within a reasonable drive away. Although shipping parts is a normal occurrence in any business, I always prefer hand delivering parts to insure they don’t get lost or damaged when shipped. Some of these parts are irreplaceable, and a little effort on my part can save some future heartache!

Before I could take these headers out for shipping, I had to fix a stripped bolt that used to secure the exhaust shield that covers the header. It looks like someone tried to fix this sheared bolt by attempting to drill it out, but the drill bit walked off the top of the bolt. Luckily, they stopped before making more damage, but left the repair for me to fix!

The attempted repair failed probably because they were using a hand drill, and it is nearly impossible to drill down the center of a sheared bolt without some help. I had a lot better chance succeeding with the header off the car, and a welder to add more material to drill. There were two ways to fix this problem, one was to try and extract the original bolt, or two, weld and cut a new hole and tap new threads. I decided to pick option two since this bolt was not critical in it’s purpose and just needed a decent hole with threads to work.

After grinding away the weld flush with the surface of the hole, I had a nice flat area to center punch a new hole. If I got it in the same position as the original hole, great, but it wasn’t necessary for all this to work.

The next decision was where was I going to mount this header to drill my hole? My Bridgeport would have been the sexiest way to drill an accurate hole, but fixuring it to the bed may have taken longer than mounting it to my drill press. I found my drill press vice was just large enough to hold the header firmly in place, and small enough to allow clearance for the pipes to hang below the table.

I made quick work of drilling a new hole and tapping new M6x1.0 threads in the stanchion. Next, the header goes out for ceramic coating!

I went to south Florida in February this year to attend Cavallino and try to win an elusive Platinum Award for this green Ferrari 330 GTC. You may remember this car from the last couple of years meeting the owner, inspecting the car, agreeing to prepare the car for Cavallino, and showing it last year. We missed the mark by a thin margin, spent the last year correcting the final faults, and this year tried one last time to get it across the line!

Cavallino, which was held at the Breakers in Palm Beach Florida for over 30 years moved to a new venue, The Boca Raton, an hour drive down the intercoastal waterway along the Atlantic. The Breakers was renovating and Canossa, the owner of Cavallino signed a three year contract with The Boca Raton, a private resort and golf course.

As with any new venue, there was a lot of teething pains. I tried my best to be patient and understanding the volunteers were as much in the dark on the new layout as I was, but hopefully they will get better with years to come.

There were 6 330 GTCs in our class, which was the largest single model collection of Vintage Ferraris than any other class. Even though cars are judged individually, having such good examples in a row made showing the green 330 that much harder. I believe the strong turn out belongs largely to Clete Gardenhour, a judge and owner of a GTC. Many years ago, Clete showed his personal GTC at a Ferrari show and won and award, but continued to correct the details on his car. The following year, he returned to receive a lower score and no award at all. His disgust was and is a common occurrence in showing a car at a Concours, but instead of simply complaining, Clete took it upon himself to create a concours guide specifically for Ferrari 330GTCs, and make it available to everyone. He tirelessly collected information, and confirmed the details with many restorers, owners, and historians. I was honored to be included as one of his resources, but this guide would not have been made without Clete’s dedication.

Other people have created guides for other models, but they are not nearly as thoroughly researched, updated, and referenced as Clete’s guide, so when I got the ribbon designating a win at Cavallino, not only did I have a long list of people to thank, I know it also came from a lot of hard work from the judges, restorers, and volunteers that put this show together.

Chas, the owner of this car couldn’t attend Cavallino this year due to the later date of the event over Valentine’s Day Weekend, but I did my best to show the car in his stead. I was so happy for the owner to have brought this car across the Platinum line. We started this journey with a nice car, but not up to Platinum Standards. I knew there were some every expensive repairs needed to make this car perfect, but I wanted to take a pragmatic approach towards winning. I took on the challenge collecting all the necessary points that we could correct, with an eye for the most return in points over cost. Platinum show judging has gotten so competitive, that often times only ground up restorations are the only way to win a Platinum, but I wanted to prove we could do it without that expense.

Our hard work and commitment paid off, and now Chas has a nice car and a Platinum award to be proud of. Thanks Everyone!

You can watch the Cavallino Experience in this YouTube video, and the story about the car that didn’t make the mark!