Second Recall For Ferrari F355 Over Fuel System Concerns

Look, I don't mean to be making light of a serious situation; car fires are no joke. I knew a guy who had his Ferrari 308 burn to the ground at a track day back in the early 90s. Now he always carries a fire extinguisher. But what gets me about this latest recall notice is that it's for a fairly old car, and it's the second recall that's been sent out for the same problem.

The recall in questions, put out by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration here in America, and concerns the Ferrari F355, and it concerns some nuts and bolts issues with the fuel system. As Bill Murray said in Ghostbusters, "Thanks. Important safety tip Egon."

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know what can happen with anything concerning fuel storage or delivery goes wrong, but you'd think that they (and I mean that in a collective way) would have figured this out the first time when the NHTSA sought to address the issue with it's initial recall 12 years ago.

This all started back in 1997 when (how shall I put this?) "concerns" arose about the F355's fuel delivery system. Normally, when NHTSA puts out a recall notice, it only takes that one time, and things are fixed, QED. But it seems like it still hasn't been resolved. Who gets the blame? "Independent automobile repair facilities", that's who.

In this instance, the feds are saying that even though the original spec on the repair back in '97 should have fixed things, the "independent automobile repair facilities" that carried out that service on a bunch of the F355s didn't install the new screw clamps properly, and while messing that up, they might have dinged up the fuel hoses. And that means the damaged fuel lines " ... could cause smoke or even an engine fire."

Peachy. Now NHTSA is saying that new fuel divider blocks should, with any luck, fix the problem. It better, because said "fuel system concern" affects some 2,356 F355s and F355 F1s rolled out from Marnello between 1995 and 1999.

Now, personally, I haven't seen an F355 catch fire, but if I owned one (yeah, if only I was that lucky), I'd have this seen to toot sweet. Sure, the F355 isn't as good as the 360, nor anywhere close to the 430 and it doesn't even compare to the upcoming 458, but it's not that bad of a car. It's sort of like Ferrari finally started paying attention to the "entry level" market with the F355.

And you know, there seems to be a bunch of them out there for reasonable prices - reasonable Ferrari prices that is.

Source: Autoblog. Photos from Flickr users Mike Yaworski, ?, Elsie esq., tandemracer and LynasUK.