Tuned Ferrari 550 Maranello Is The Best Thing You’ll Hear Today
Many Ferrari fans will remember ‘the old days’ fondly, where everything was about the sound that the engine made – don’t get us wrong, it is still very much like that but now Ferrari owners have the added luxury of things such as sat-nav, air con, automatic transmissions and heated seats. There is a bit of a divide between Ferrari owners and enthusiasts alike as to whether the Italian company were better prior to the 2000s as they are today – many say yes and many also say no.
One such vehicle at the forefront of new vs old conversations is the one and only Ferrari 550 Maranello, which some might say marked the end of an era in terms of what is considered a traditional Ferrari. Disclaimer, we don’t judge here at Grand Tour Nation and love all Ferraris somewhat equally (we all have our favourites).
Now here is where it gets interesting, I can almost guarantee that the majority of you reading this – if you owned a 550 Maranello, you would keep everything you possibly could as stock to keep the purist mentality of the traditional Ferrari alive. I’d also bet that most of you would be horrified to find out that someone has ‘souped’ one up – and we are delighted to satisfy your rage and introduce you to NiftyFiveFifty’s not so stock Maranello.
The YouTuber’s 2001 Ferrari 550 Maranello is in Argentino (grey to the less exotic of us out there), which will look like the image below and to some peoples horror (and our pleasure after watching the below video), has decided to ‘enhance’ the vehicle using some very pricey parts from none other than Fiammenghi Engineering – including equal length headers, connectors, exhaust collectors, and to top it all off – H-pipes.
In the video, we are only treated to an interior camera view and sound from the camera that Nifty is using – which would often take away from the sound quality of the vehicle.. but not today! This thing is just so loud that even us armchair pundits sitting at home can make the very easy assumption that this thing is flaming loud. Under the bonnet, NiftyFiveFifty has got the famed Tipo F122A 5.5 litre naturally-aspirated V12 that churns out 478 bhp and a huge 419lb-ft of torque.
Now, this is nothing like the sound of an Enzo, a V12 and of course the La Ferrari but for one of their grand tourers – the noise is quite frankly glorious. This isn’t even Nifty’s final form for the 550 Maranello, as he is planning on installing some custom mufflers to tone things down a bit – anyway, here is the much-anticipated video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCU93H77Nhs&feature=emb_title
We’re sure this experiment will divide opinion – sound off in comments.
I prefer a 350 Chev. Going by the speed by the truck it wasn’t very fast and started to splutter and miss fire.
Straight up Louis Armstrong reincarnated as a car.