Surely it can’t be just this

After asking around I found another mechanic who was willing to take on the project of solving the ‘chuggs’. I therefore picked the car up from Ferrari and drove it to him.

Having described the issues he went straight to the seal inside the petrol cap. Took one look and said that it wasn’t the right seal and that may have been contributing to the issues. I can tell you that I will be both extremely happy and extremely annoyed if that does in fact turn out to be the case.

The old (wrong) seal had a metal cap as shown above, whereas the correct seal

is all rubber with no metal parts as shown above.

I left the car with him for a week and he tested it thoroughly using all the processes I encountered that caused the ‘chuggs’. The main one was getting the car hot and then refuelling.

Throughout all the tests the car performed faultlessly and based on that assessment I picked it up and brought it home. Again, without issues. To be honest it started much stronger that it had and drove well on the return trip.

It would seem to me that perhaps the fuel cap seal is just the last (hopefully) in a long line of issues that contributed to the ‘chuggs’. I think the main issue was that the injectors were in fact dribbling prior to a good ultrasonic clean (detailed here). However, getting a variety of things fixed/replaced like the charcoal canister, greasing the mass fly wheel, etc. all contributed to the overall resolution.

So, fingers crossed, the ‘chuggs’ have been solved but I won’t be fully confident until I have driven the car a few times, refuelled and repeated the typical process I saw when the ‘chuggs’ materialised. How many drives/weeks will that be? Not really sure but for now I’m happy to have the car back and be able to drive it again. Let’s hope that indeed the issues have been resolved.