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- If you were between the ages of eight and 18
in late 1990s and loved cars,
there's one arcade game you probably remember.
It had a racing bucket,
it had a real steering wheel and three massive screens.
It was the Ferrari 355 Challenge Simulator by Sega
and it was mind blowing.
Not just for the graphics, but for the sound.
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This is a Ferrari 355 challenge evo.
There are 109 of them made,
Out of 109 of them, probably the vast majority
were crashed by drivers or people like me.
In the late nineties, if you wanted to go racing a Ferrari
this is what you bought.
Now, this one was modified by Modificata
to become street legal.
What does that mean?
Well, street tires, street exhaust
and the interior was restored because most of these cars
end up getting their interior gutted
to save weight for racing.
Car like this will cost you about $300,000 nowadays.
But what if you wanted a Ferrari 355,
with this sort of performance, without that price tag?
You get this.
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This is a Ferrari 355 with race car parts on it.
Now, you might be asking me
why does that matter so much Rob?
Well, after the 355,
Ferrari realized how much people wanted
race car parts on street cars.
And so the 360 got the Challenge Stradale, the 430
got the Scuderia and that class of car was born.
But the 355 never got that.
And so this one's been modified to be like the race car
but street legal.
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Right off the bat,
the first thing I realized about this car,
piston engines grab all the way up to 8,500 RPM,
and they sound so good doing that.
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Other people including myself grew up thinking,
exotics untouchable, you cannot modify an exotic.
It comes from a factory.
It's gotta have custom gold, special titanium
platinum parts that are untouchable.
But as we've gone on,
we've realized that that's not the case.
These cars just like almost all the other cars
in the late nineties or even earlier than that
were capable of being modified.
They weren't necessarily perfect.
They definitely have their own personality.
And of course, personalities can change.
You can modify 'em, you can grow.
And it doesn't necessarily have to make it faster,
it can just make it the way you want it to feel.
You want it to be louder, that's what you like about it?
Well, that makes your experience better
and that's all that matters.
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Cars like this, when you hear exotic or supercar
it becomes very intimidating
that you think that that's untouchable,
but as they've aged, you realize at the end of the day,
it's still four wheels,
they still have disc brakes, standard things
that you would modify on a Honda civic.
When you used to hear these cars,
it was a rumor that, "Okay clutch job was gonna be $30,000
or oil change was a couple grand."
You'd have to take a loan just for that.
And in reality it's the same.
Albeit that there's custom parts
but I will tell you right now
something that blew my mind is the engine inside of here.
Yes, it may be 20 plus year is old,
but it screams so high in the RPM.
I didn't know that piston engines
could go that high back then.
And this isn't some low mile trailer queen
only driven on the 19th Sunday of the year,
if the sky is clear and the humidity is under 20%
this thing is driven, daily driven.
Look at the break dust on the wheel.
This thing is beat on by its owner,
Modificata founder, Jeff Segal.
And if you're gonna find somebody to modify Ferraris
you could do worse than a Le mans winner like Jeff.
And if you're gonna drive the cars,
you could hardly do better
than a place like The Concours Club here in Miami.
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This started its life as a base model.
I use that term carefully, base model 355
but you've modified it considerably
almost in the spirit of the blue car.
Could you talk a little bit about that?
- The blue car for me
is like the ultimate manifestation of a 355
and that car has everything
but probably a little bit too much for the street.
So what I wanted to do was
pull the elements from that car
that I thought were important
to enhance the driving experience on this car.
From that the single most important thing
was the quicker ratio, steering rack.
Anybody that's driven a stock 355
immediately would probably say
that the steering is disappointing
that it's vague, it's slow, it lacks feel.
And that was a huge change on the 355 challenge Evo
was the first thing I did to this car.
We've made changes to the suspension
to the anti roll bars, same as that car.
And then of course it has the louder exhaust.
So in the challenge series
there were two exhausts that were offered.
The blue car has straight pipes.
That was the loud option.
And then this car has the silenced option exhaust
at the moment.
- Now, when it comes to modifying or tuning a car
in my world like the JDM world, it's pretty much encouraged.
Is that the case with modifying Ferrari?
- Definitely not.
I think the majority of the owner
are all about the concourse.
They're all about originality
making sure it's original paint,
it's original service records,
you know, if they could
they'd have the original air in the tires,
that's not for me.
I always held this car in really high regarded, growing up,
I loved the way it looked,
I loved the way it sounded,
I loved the idea of it,
I couldn't get enough of reading the reports
and the way people talked about it.
But when I finally drove one
to be honest, I was disappointed.
It needed something more.
So, my whole goal here was to just strike that balance
between, I guess, preserving what made the car cool
to me in the first place.
- Yeah,
- But making the driving experience
worthy of everything I had built it up to be.
- We just got the experience for me to drive this here.
I definitely can't drive that car
as well as it can be driven.
- If this is a step from the road car to this
that's probably another five steps in intensity
so let's do it.
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- So I'm a Lamborghini guy.
I have a Diablo.
So I come from that side.
- But if you're a Lamborghini guy and you have a Diablo
then I think to some degree you do get this car,
because like a Diablo, there's a lot to love about it.
And like a Diablo,
they were sort of flawed at the time as well.
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- Great looking car, great sounding car.
Ultimately, it can be a lot of fun to drive
but a little bit troublesome,
a little bit maintenance intensive.
Hence the restoration on this one,
not just being a coat of paint.
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Code 355 challenge was a gentleman spec series
that Ferrari started akin at the Lamborghini
Super Trofeo now or the Porsche Carrera Cup.
So it was based on the 355 Berlinetta.
And at the time the cars were initially barely modified
really just the roll cage, fire suppression system,
racing scenes and that was it.
As the series evolved from 94
to the end of the 355 challenge, the cars got an evo kit
and that's what this one is.
Which had a faster steering rack,
which had some different cooling options,
which has the rear wing, you know
just a series of updates, different anti roll bars.
So, they really enhanced the performance of the car.
So this is kind of like
let's say the ultimate iteration with 355.
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Starting to get a little louder.
- Yeah, that's alright.
- What I really like about the 355 is when you rub it
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Just like the video game
- Just keeps going.
- Just keeps going, we need a longer straight.
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And then with the H pattern gear box,
you really just want to keep going through the gears.
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It's much slower than a paddle shift car
but so much more fun to drive because it challenges you.
And the car moves around, there's no traction control,
there's no stability control,
the ideas that it has
is very very crude by modern standards.
- Yeah.
- So, you know, even without pushing too hard
you really feel the car's alive
and you don't have to be going a million miles an hour
to feel like you're at the limit, because you're not.
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- So, when you see cars like this aging,
your first instinct is to preserve.
And what I would almost argue
is that you can preserve it better by upgrading it.
Now here me out, the computer for this car was built When,
would you still use that computer now
to do all of your current internet and email all that?
No.
I would rather have a modern computer controlling it
if I was trying to preserve the car.
Take the old stuff out of it.
And sure if you wanna preserve that stuff, matching numbers
or whatever weird obsession people have
with collecting like that, sure, set those parts aside.
But the car, you bought the car, you bought the experience,
why not enjoy it?
And maybe that's my excuse for making more power
or making it handle better or whatever.
But at the end of the day, it's still your car.
And unless you're just saving it for somebody else,
enjoy it.
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