1983 Ferrari Mondial Quattrovalvole: Ferrari Rolls Out New Engine Tech

From the April 1983 issue of Car and Driver.

As you drive beneath the raised gate and into Ferrari’s Maranello compound, Enzo Ferrari’s office sits immediately to the left. The room is large but not enormous, furnished sparingly, and painted a dark shade of grayish blue. To the right of the wide desk, carefully placed among other mementos, is a picture of Gilles Villeneuve, and high above, indi­vidual lights bathe the room softly like the God-rays that highlight fields of grain beneath towering thunderheads. To the left of the desk, the rear door opens and quickly Enzo Ferrari is in the room, shaking hands with the U.S. press expeditionary force that has come to sample his new quattrovalvole engine. Ferrari’s hand is warm and firm, 84 years old.

In an obviously good humor, he leads us through a question-and-answer session lengthier than his assistants have anticipated. His answers are sharp and wary, his wit as bright and shiny as the light haloing through his white hair. His phone jangles. The afternoon is waning and Mauro Forghieri is calling with re­sults of F1 testing in France. Ferrari re­moves his dark glasses and puts on a pair for reading, and begins to take notes with a fine-tipped marker on a lined pad. His handwriting is small and fluid. His questions are regular and pointed. For the moment we have been forgotten. Ferrari thanks Forghieri, hangs up, and motions for the book he will autograph for us. He will leave us free to have dinner with his right-hand man. He knows his meeting with us has had remarkable impact. Stars have a way of always knowing things like that.

Over dinner, Eugenio Alzati, Ferrari direttore generale, is afire with enthusiasm. A small, trim, smiling man with dancing brown eyes, Alzati is telling our table that a Car and Driver test of the Mondial (which was a genuine stone in its original, underpowered configuration, need­ing 9.3 seconds to reach 60 mph) was responsible for the decision to go ahead with the quattrovalvole engine. Ferrari, as the story goes, called Alzati into his of­fice, waved a copy of our November ’81 issue around (accompanied by appro­priate invectives), flung it across his desk, and declared that something had to be done. (To be honest, Road & Track, which also took issue with the Mondial’s performance, is also given credit for Ferrari’s leap into action.)

The four-valve Ferrari engine proba­bly would have happened anyway. Even since the company’s move under the mighty wing of Fiat for better or for worse, the powers that be at Ferrari have never entirely lost sight of that fi­nal necessary ingredient called speed.

And what better way to get more speed than by adding sixteen additional valves to Ferrari’s proven, electronically fuel­-injected, double-overhead-cam V-8s?

Says C/D technical editor Csaba Csere: “The basic advantage or four­-valve heads is that they breathe better than two-valve heads. It isn’t because of valve area per se, it’s because of curtain area, which is the mathematical product of the perimeter of the valve and the valve lift. Curtain area is significant even at relatively low valve lifts, so it’s not entirely a racing phenomenon. Be­cause a four-valve engine has very good breathing inherently, you don’t have to use wild camshaft timing to get good flow at high rpm, so you can produce an engine that has a very broad power band, with good low-end and midrange power. Four valves also allow placing the spark plug in the center of the combustion chamber, which is very desir­able for rapid combustion because it shortens the maximum distance the flame has to travel to reach the edges of the chamber. Using four valves also al­lows a shallower chamber with less of a peak in it than is possible with two larg­er valves, again promoting faster, more even burning. And four valves create lots of good turbulence—with airflow coming from two sources, there’s lots of intermixing—which contributes to rapid combustion. Basically, for a street car, four valves have no disadvantages. They’re better for power at all speeds, for emissions, for fuel economy, and octane requirements. Of course they do cost more money because of their complication.”

All of which sounds good and runs better. Loosed on the Fiorano test track, the American-specification four-valve Mondials and 308s we set foot to were transformed by their newfound energy. Their throttles proved just as effective in steering the cars as their steering wheels. Less throttle? Big understeer. More throttle? Big oversteer. The Mondial in particular had a tendency to swap pendulum-like between push and loose, its bulky, mid-engine guise even more handling-sensitive than the small­er 308’s. This is the Mondial’s price for its added bulk and its most modest, child-sized back seats.

As to whether Enzo Ferrari will be happy after we get a chance to run a full set of instrumented tests on the new quattrovalvole Mondial, we can only wait and see. We can say already that the en­gines are a complete success in feel, very full of willing and eye-opening performance.

Tell us again about how Enzo Ferrari is too old to know what he’s doing. Ha! And mark our words, the Japanese will be hot on his tail with a whole bundle of four-valve technology in the coming years. But Ferrari has beat them to the punch: His quattrovalvole will hit the American market first.

Source: Reviews - aranddriver.com