Original Coverage & Source Attribution: www.slashgear.com
YouTuber Mat Armstrong is well known for taking on tricky repair projects, including some that car manufacturers don’t approve of. He previously ended up in a public dispute with Bugatti over a crashed Chiron Pur Sport that the automaker thought was too difficult to repair, and one of his latest projects is similarly controversial. Armstrong sourced a Ferrari 296 GTB that had been crashed by its owner in Cyprus, then brought it back to the U.K. for repairs with the aim of making some modifications along the way.
Rather than return the Ferrari back to factory spec, the YouTuber wanted to make a road-legal version of the 296 Challenge, which is a track-only special edition of the car that was designed for an exclusive one-make race series. Armstrong managed to find and buy several parts of a Challenge body kit for his crashed 296, but Ferrari quickly found out about his plan and stopped him from buying any more Challenge parts.
That didn’t stop Armstrong, who continued to work on both repairing his car and completing the modifications that were needed to accommodate the Challenge kit. However, his team ran into a major hurdle that they simply couldn’t clear: the car wouldn’t start, regardless of what they tried. After trying everything they could think of, including spending thousands of dollars on a new hybrid battery for the car, they contacted Ferrari to see if the manufacturer’s technicians could help.
Ferrari’s techs helped get the car running again
Despite blocking Armstrong from getting the parts he needed for a full 296 Challenge conversion, Ferrari did agree to look at his car to see if they could work out what was wrong with it. The only catch was that they needed the car to be complete — i.e. not in pieces all over Armstrong’s workshop — before they’d work on it. After figuring out how to get the air conditioning systems to fit around the new Challenge parts they’d fitted, Armstrong and his team managed to put the car back together and promptly sent it off to a dealer for diagnosis.
After a week with the technicians, the car was returned with a few key faults fixed. One issue that Ferrari spotted was that Armstrong’s team had disconnected the handbrake in order to move the car more easily when it was being shipped from Cyprus, but hadn’t reconnected it. The car detected that the handbrake wasn’t on, and its safety systems kicked in to prevent the car from charging its plug-in hybrid (PHEV) system’s battery when it was plugged in. This tiny problem proved to be the root cause of the persistent charging issues that Armstrong and his team had spent months trying to fix.
The steering wheel was another major problem
The second issue Ferrari’s techs found was that the touch-sensitive engine start-stop button on the steering wheel wasn’t working. Replacing the old steering wheel with a brand new one solved the problem.
This was particularly annoying for the YouTuber, who had already bought a spare steering wheel off another crashed 296 and fitted it to the car to see if it would allow the engine to start. In the end, he figured out that when the airbags in both his car’s steering wheel and his second-hand replacement activated during their respective crashes, they had caused some unseen damage to the circuitry near the start-stop button that prevented it from working.
With its hybrid battery no longer dead and the start-stop button working, Armstrong was able to finish building the cooling system for the car, fit the remaining parts, and eventually take it for a test drive on the road. It’s well worth watching the full video to see exactly how that test drive went, but it’s safe to say that he came away impressed.
Since then, the Armstrong has continued to work on the car, completing the legal process to officially re-import the car to the U.K. before taking it to the mainland to test it out on track. The work isn’t over yet though, as Armstrong now plans to remap the car to get rid of its last major warning light.
