Ferrari 360 Spider

I'm coming up on the one year anniversary of owning my gated Ferrari 360 Spider. In that time, I've learned a tremendous amount about the car and especially, the systems. At this writing, the car is working 100%. I wish I could say that about the entire year. Unfortunately, with any twenty year old exotic, it's going to have good days and bad days.I've racked up about 1,200 miles in the year without being stranded. The car has had a few close calls but the car always carried me home. Thank you, sweet car, for that!Maintenance IssuesI had an issue with the throttle bodies (TB) on the day I picked up the car. I just didn't know it. The TB issue would come and go as time passed, masquerading as other issues and finally, causing the engine to go into "pedal limp" (20% throttle). Eventually, the problem was properly diagnosed and cured. Problems with the TB's can be cured very easily by simply replacing both affected units with new parts at a (parts alone…

Virtually every Ferrari 360 and 430 has failing elastic bands in the capote, or soft top. The only cars that don't have these items failed right now have had them replaced in the last five years. My car is no exception and my original 20 year old elastic bands are well past the time they should be replaced.
The top has a number of elastic bands that help control how it folds up and how things move. These bands are the same type of material as appears in underwear and stretch pants. As these things age, they wear out. So just like your old underwear, the elastic on the 360/430 top loses it's stretch.
One of the things these elastic bands do is control a bar that shapes the headliner and roof line. This bar has to be pulled back and lie flat so the rest of the machinery that constitutes the top can fit into the tiny little space in the back of the car. When the elastic bands give out, the bar doesn't move to the right spot and the frame can impact on that bar as the top folds …

My 360 started going into limp mode a while back. It was subtle at first, with it starting to lose power after 4,000 RPM's and then less subtle when it would barely go above idle. Limp mode protects the car when some vital part has malfunctioned.
I know a master Ferrari tech that is nice enough to answer questions for me about the car. He lives more than five hundred miles away and it's like telemedicine. The codes indicated a problem in the drive-by-wire circuit, likely culprit: One or more TB's or the accelerator potentiometer (AP), which is the foot pedal sensor. I had a good code reader that could monitor the AP voltages (2) and they appeared to be within specification. That left the TB's, one or both.
After a long discussion with the tech, his answer was to replace the throttle bodies (TB). The Ferrari 360 has two TB's. One for each bank of four cylinders. To the Ferrari mentality, replacement could only be with two new TB's: "Ferrari likes replacing th…