So last week my 360 went off on an adventure of its own. My brother had asked if he could borrow it for a couple of days while his wife and he stayed at Limewood. As it’s a fancy place, and I had no plans to use the car for a couple of weeks, I agreed he could showoff for a few days. All I asked was that he try and get a couple of good photographs of the Ferrari in front of hotel’s main building, which he was more than happy to do.He came up to collect the car one Friday morning and we managed to get him turned around before the evening rush-hour kicked it. It was a rather odd feeling watching my Ferrari pull away down my road and turn the corner; though it did sound nice.
It turns out he had plans for more that just a hotel stay, as I was alerted to via text message a couple days later, when I was told he had driven to Wilton House for their Franco-Italian furore Wake Up. While there, they were treated to an F12 TDF as well as a Bugatti Veyron! I very much approved of this, especially over perhaps just driving in to town to showoff.
He then explained to me that when they pulled up in front of Limewood, they basically disrupted a photoshoot. As it happened, Peter Cooper were getting some photographs for their new venture into Prestige Cars. As they didn’t have a Ferrari available they politely asked my brother if they could include it, right in the centre. I was just expecting a couple of nice pictures with the hotel as the backdrop, not some professional shoot.
With the return of my Ferrari a week after it had departed, I decided it was time to finally get the passenger door fixed (again). Unfortunately when I dropped by Slade’s Garage, they explained that it would be several weeks before they could fix it in; they were in the process of shuffling all of their cars around to get them in to their new, purpose-built storeroom. So while it’s good news to hear they are increasing their capacity, it was a little disappointing to be turned away until they actually have space to receive any more cars. In fact it wouldn’t have been a problem if I didn’t want it fixed for the Bath Festival of Motoring in three weeks.
Instead of trying to find someone else who I could trust with my Ferrari—and wasn’t going to either rip me off, or just quickly replace the plastic clip without investigating what was the root cause of the problem—I decided to undertake the challenge myself. I was able to find an excellent guide online that walked through the steps of removing the door card to expose the internals of the door, and then detailed how to remove the mechanism and cabling. Whilst we weren’t as quick as the guide suggested (10-15 minutes to remove the panel, quickly became about 40), we were eventually able to see what had happened and discuss what we thought we should do next.
Over the course of the weekend we removed the locking mechanism and were able to better see what had caused the cable to release from the clip attaching it to the exterior door handle: the cable was not able to move freely in its sheath. Despite oiling the cable, it would not move freely when in place; looped from the mechanism to the handle. With this now in mind, it became obvious that I needed to order a new cable and a couple of clips before any further work could be completed. Hopefully these will turn up before next weekend so we can fit them in plenty of time before the carshow; perhaps even more wishfully is that they won’t expose the mechanism as equally culpable in this saga.
