With 488 Pista deliveries in full force we thought it was time we dedicated a blog post to going through the main modification it might be worth considering on your new, shiny car!
There is one problem that is universal to all Pista owners, and is one we covered at length over the course of the 488 GTB/Spider life cycle…a turbocharged V8 simply doesn’t provide the sound track that the numbers should provide. The bottom line is that you shouldn’t get out of a 710hp, 205mph Ferrari that you’ve been red-lining consistently and say “it just doesn’t sound that great.”
Not all turbocharged engines sound dull, anyone who has seen ANY footage of the Group B Rally cars (RS200, Quattro et al), or the legendary 1992 video of Jacques Lafitte hammering an F40 LM around the track will confirm that the sound of a turbo V8 can be tantamount to a religious experience…the real question is “how do we get the Pista to sound angrier?”
The first thing to acknowledge is that you’re starting with a pretty great platform – the engine is straight out of the 488 race car, and most crucially the rear silencer is made from Inconel (a nickel-chromium superalloy most commonly used for Formula 1 exhausts…this stuff is the final word in heat management). Novitec’s ability to work with Inconel is simply unparalleled, and their 488 GTB rear silencer, even in steel guise, was truly transformative – for this reason their offering is the obvious choice!
The real key here, however, is to remove the catalytic converters and install a set of cat replacement pipes – if we break down the elements of an exhaust system by part we find that they fulfil the following roles, the rear silencer crafts the TONE, the catalytic converters control VOLUME and BACKPRESSURE.
Essentially replacing the back boxes alone will change the way the car sounds, but the cat replacement pipes will give the car a level of volume that a car of this calibre deserves. The best way to explain backpressure is by describing it as the pressure that the engine has to fight against when expelling gases through the exhaust system – cats create a huge amount of pressure and with them removed the engine can breathe more freely. This ultimately translates to increased volume and power increases.
Removing the cats will cause a check engine light as the car’s ECUs will deem that the cats aren’t operating as efficiently as required…because they’re no longer there. The solution here is a simple one, Capristo’s tried and tested OBD wizard. This little unit plugs right into the OBD port found in the driver’s footwell and tells the car to ignore the warning code pertaining to the missing cats! Problem solved.
The final piece of the puzzle is to install Capristo’s valve control system, this allows you to have total manual control of whether the valves are open or closed via their proprietary remote control. The car currently measures vehicle speed, engine speed and throttle input (a metric called load request) and decides whether or not to open the valves – often owners think the valves open at 3K RPM or when the Mannetino switch is set to RACE. With this system the car will continue to operate the valves on this basis if left alone, but the remote controls now allow you to open or close them at will!
With that we can now lay out the exhaust configuration it its entirety:
- Novitec Inconel rear silencers
- Capristo cat replacement pipes
- Capristo OBD wizard
- Capristo valve control system
Have a look at the video below to get an idea of how much more exciting your car could sound with a proper exhaust on it