On the road again...

After a couple of weeks of rain, there's been a break in the weather and a spot of sunshine today (my cat Boris can vouch for this... as you can see he loves to sunbathe), so I took advantage of this and took the car for a drive.

I primarily wanted to try the brakes out, since they've now covered well over the bedding in 1000km distance. I therefore got some speed up and gave them a good warming up by seeing how fast I could go from 200km/h down to about 80km/h. They seem to work well, with no sign of fading. I didn't push them so hard as to lock them up, but I certainly had the rear end of the car lightening up and giving a bit of a wiggle. I was also getting a bit confident around the corners and approaching opposite lock territory, but since changing the wheels and fitting much wider tires on the back, the car adheres to the road far more than it used to (going from 225 to 255 width on the rear) so I have to push it quite hard to get the rear out. Traction from stand still is also much better than it used to be, which I'm sure improves the 0-60km/h sprint times.


After picking up the wife, we decided to drive to the beach for a coffee and enjoy the warm weather for a while. On the way back, we stopped off at a travel agent to see if we could organise a holiday in a month or so's time... walking or cycling in France, driving down there in the Ghibli. This kind of puts the pressure on to get the car running good and reliable before then, which is going to be tighter than I thought since Jorrit is having trouble sourcing one of the parts for my new rear bumper.

Since I have a non-ABS Ghibli, it needs adapter brackets fitting in order to install the ABS and later car's bumpers, as you can see from the drawing below.


Part 11 on the drawing is the bit that is missing. Apparently they have it on back order at the factory, which means that it will likely take some time to get delivered. Since I don't mind getting a second hand part (you don't see this part), I wrote to David Askew. Turns out he has a new part in stock, so hopefully I can get this delivered and fitted within the next couple of weeks!

Talking of factory parts, Jorrit was telling me that Maserati have now honoured their 10 year commitment to maintain spare parts at the factory for the Ghibli, but since they have no obligation to keep these for more than 10 years (production stopped around 1997 to 1998), they're likely to let the parts run out now and not replace them. This means that parts for the Ghibli will start to become harder and harder (and likely more expensive) to source.