[cribbj]

When I first learned that Ferrari had put pillow ball (spherical bearing) top shock mounts on the 550, it was another of those “WTF were they thinking?” moments. For me, solid, pillow ball shock mounts have about as much place on a high end GT as Heim joints. I’m told the only other “street” Ferrari that had these solid mounts was the 355 Challenge , which I suppose was the homologated version of the full on racecar.

Once I learned what sort of mounts the 550 had, all the little bumps, thumps and whumps that I was hearing and feeling whenever I went over railroad tracks, tar strips, and other road irregularities then made sense, and I was resolved to sort out yet another mad idea from the Italian engineers. I researched the 575’s shock mounts and learned for that model, Ferrari had come to their senses, dumped the spherical bearings of the 550, and gone back to rubber isolation, but unfortunately the 550 couldn’t be upgraded to the 575’s mounts. Of course not; that would be too sensible, and sensible is soooo un-Italian. So when I learned that our member “Ferraridriver” was converting these things to normal rubber dampened mounts, I knew I had to have a set.

To minimize downtime I acquired a used set of rear shock mounts and sent them to Dave, who modified them as described, and returned them with full instructions how to install them. I decided I was going to have them done at the same time as my fuel tank was being pulled to sort out the leaking rollover valves. So last month while I was playing desert fox, Mark Darragh and the crew at Sphere Motorsports in Houston, pulled my fuel tank, changed all the rollover valves and gaskets, and at the same time, installed the “new” shock mounts.

I picked up the car last week and on the drive home, I immediately noticed a difference in the feel of the suspension. There’s a series of manhole covers in the road near Mark’s shop which I always steer around, as if I hit them, the car sounds, feels, and acts like a 60’s pickup truck with a set of blown shocks. Well, I was suffering mightily from jet lag and completely forgot about them and hit those puppies dead on, and literally cringed as I did so, but the car hardly reacted at all. There was just a minor bu-bu-bump feel that hardly would have put a ripple in a cup of coffee, had I been holding one. Astounding. Before this suspension mod, I would have been wearing the whole cup! Encouraged, I decided to nail a known set of killer railroad tracks at speed instead of gingerly creeping over them like eggshells. Same thing – the car just took it in stride, and if I hadn’t known better, I would have thought I was in a Merc, not the 200 mph Italian equivalent of a 60’s chebbie pickup with blown shocks.

So the feel of the car has been transformed from totally solid (you usually get that when you mount metal to metal) to compliant but taut (with the top of the shock isolated from the frame of the car by compressed rubber.)

In summary, this is a suspension mod that really works, and is a very good thing. And to think only the rear of the car has been done so far – now I can’t wait to get the fronts done!

And with these mounts there'll be no more twisted shock actuators either!

[tazandjan]

John- What Dave essentially does is build a hyperblock that performs like the one on the 575M, even if it does not look like it. No idea why Ferrari went metal to metal on a GT. Between Dave's hyperblock and his adaptation of Corvette actuators, he pretty much solved the suspension problems on the 550. Delta Vee can solve the shock bebuild problem, if the Bilsteins ever need rebuilding.