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!”