Ferrari Engines Enthusiasts’ Manual

FRANCESCO REGGIANI with KEITH BLUEMEL, Haynes, £35, ISBN 978 1 78521 208 6

If you like the nuts and bolts of engines, and the idea of uncovering those within Ferrari’s creations over the years, then you’ll like this. It’s a tear-down of 15 engines from 1947 to today, all the engines photographed in their complete state against a black ‘studio’ background (actually a cloth backdrop in an Italian Ferrari engine specialist’s workshop) before we feast on the castings and componentry.

The detail is marvellous: a hairpin valve spring and rocker here, a carburettor throat there, a tappet with shim nestling within somewhere else. We begin with an early Colombo V12 (from the 195 Inter) and end with the 6.3-litre, 651bhp V12 from 2011’s four-wheel-drive FF, the engines in-between varying from obvious (Lampredi ‘long-block’ V12, production Dino V6, 308 V8, BB flat-12) to engagingly marginal. The turbocharged 208 V8, for example, gets a chapter to itself, in which we discover – although author Reggiani doesn’t make anything of it – that this is probably the only Ferrari engine whose piston stroke is longer than its bore.

Key cars into which the various engines are fitted are described and photographed, required and welcome to avoid repetition when another Colombo V12 variant is under scrutiny. And there’s a small section at the back on four competition engines, presumably those that happened to be out of cars and available for photography, including the Super Squalo GP car’s four-cylinder twin-cam.

The book is not without fault, though. The prose is relentless in its unstructured barrage of facts, with history and technicality blurred together, and some of the photography isn’t as sharp as the ‘studio’ look requires. A ‘family tree’, showing which engine was developed from which, would have been useful too. But there’s huge detail, visual and verbal, to enjoy.