Ferris Bueller Coupe Comes to Motiva
If you’ve ever rented the movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” you’ll remember it featured a 1961 Ferrari 250GT California Spyder. Well, Motiva was called on the other day to perform custom tuning on such a vehicle.
Actually, it wasn’t a genuine Ferrari but a replica created so class-skipping high schooler Matthew Broderick, star of the 1986 movie, and his girlfriend Mia Sara, could blast around in a Ferrari-like vehicle without actually risking a real Ferrari.
(Good thing, because they crash it through a plate-glass window. In a foreshadowing of a crash of another kind, an 11-year-old Charlie Sheen is in the movie, too. He plays a kid in a police station).
2011 Ford GT 5.0 Engine Installed
The car is basically a fiberglass-body knockoff, an amalgam of the best features of Ferrari Spyders from 1958 through 1961, mounted on an MGB frame.
Still, it’s a great-looking machine with classic lines. A Louisiana owner just had one of our favorite engines — you guessed it — a 2011 Ford GT 5.0 engine — installed by a shop in Tucson that knows what we can do with this engine.
That’s how this copy of what is now known as a “Ferris Bueller Ferrari” came through the the doors of Motiva Performance Engineering in Albuquerque for a custom tuning to maximize performance from its non-turbocharged V8.
The first thing was saw was a problem with the intake air flow. The intake was mounted behind the left headlight. Whenever the radiator fan kicked on, it dirtied (or disrupted) the airflow into the intake. That meant squirrelly readings to the intake air sensor. 
No way could this thing go on the Dyno with a major value missing from the tuning equation. I told the owner and he said fix it. It’s a good thing we have some decent fabricating capability at Motiva, which is why he came to us. We make the best better.
Motiva Cleans Up Intake Airflow
We ran 22.8 inches of intake along the inside of the engine compartment, from about where the shark gills are located on the driver’s side, forward to the intake manifold. The starting point is a natural low pressure area devoid of ram effect and a good spot for mounting the intake to get a clean flow of air and a reliable air sensor reading.
That’s just a small piece of the story of how we helped our client get maximum power from this stylish red convertible that’s bound to turn a few heads when it blasts off from a stoplight back in Louisiana.
Moral of the story: “If it has an engine, we can make it faster.”