Ferrari 328 Interior Restoration Series: Part 1

This is a multi-part series on a project I tackled to restore the interior of my 24-year-old Ferrari 328 GTS using products from Leatherique.  Throughout this series, I’ll give you some background and show you the “before” condition of the leather.  I’ll walk through the Conditioning and Cleaning process, the Re-Dying process and, finally, show the end result.

I hope this series as much fun to read as was the actual restoration work (and seeing the end result).

Part One:  In the Beginning…

If you’ve ever Googled “Leatherique and Ferrari” in the same search, you have likely ran across a pretty infamous article by a gentleman named Mike Charness.  By all accounts, Mike wrote the book on reconditioning and restoring Connolly leather—the hide of choice by Ferrari.  Mike’s article details his experience re-dying the leather of his Ferrari 308.  The article is extremely detailed, but is missing one thing…..Pictures!  In Mike’s article, he mentions he is re-dying the “15-year-old” seats.  If I did my math correctly, that means his article was potentially written in 1999, making his article, at a minimum, 12-years-old (last production year for the 308 was 1984, plus 15 years is 1999).  While it is very impressive that an article like his can stand the test of time, I wanted to expand on it…make it a little more modern, add some illustrations and share my experience re-dying the entire interior of a 24-year-old Ferrari 328.

Let’s start with a little history on my car.  The “barn find” 1987 Ferrari 328 GTS Euro…or was it a shed, or a field…either way, it needed some good TLC.  Others may have seen dollar signs and wanted to part it out, I saw a diamond in the rough and believed a good mechanical and cosmetic restoration was all she needed to—once again—be a shining example of rolling Italian art.   With only 35,000 km (21,700 miles) on the odometer when I took possession, the car is considered to be well below average in terms of mileage.  Keep in mind, since it was a European-spec car, all the gauges—with the exception of the “federalized” speedometer are metric.  The “federalized” speedometer is simply a sticker that is placed over the original odometer that represents MPH as the primary measure and KPH as the secondary measure.  However, when these cars were federalized, the work required to switch out the odometer mechanism to count miles instead of kilometers usually was usually omitted.  This was generally due to the amount of labor (and cost) involved to change out the mechanism.  My car still counts in kilometers, not miles.  Evidence this when doing “per gallon” calculations.  On our recent trip to Asheville, we averaged 25 KPG…that’s roughly 15.5 miles-per-gallon….yep, it’s still counting kilometers!

Back to the seats…following Mike’s theme, let’s talk about my 24-year-old seats (and interior).  My seats and other interior pieces never really felt cardboard hard, but they were really filthy, faded, famished and had a few scrapes on them, but overall were in good shape (from a foundational perspective—meaning, under 24 years of dirt and grime was really good leather with solid stitching and no rips or holes).  The driver’s bolster on the low slung seats is notorious for showing excessive wear.  The driver’s-side bolster was in really good shape, just further evidence to support the average of 900 miles per year on the odometer. 

Having great luck with the Steering Wheel, I kept with the Leatherique products and purchased dye based on a cutout of an unfaded swatch of leather from under the center tunnel.  I highly recommend not ordering based off color codes and numbers from reference books or manuals.  If you want a certain color, cut a swatch and mail it to the folks at Leatherique.  I also purchased some crack filler, Rejuvenator Oil, Prestine Clean and Leather Prepping Agent.  The entire interior came out of the car (seats, seat trim, door panels, center console / tunnel and seatbelt covers.  The only part that remained was the parking brake handle.  Everything else covered with tan leather was removed. 

The pictures that follow show the cosmetic condition of the leather before any work was completed.  Note all the dirt and grime on the surface and embedded in the pores of the hide.

The seats...driver's seat on the left, passenger seat on the right (yes...I know I sat them on the ground backwards)...

 Close-up of one of the seat pans (note all the dirt and grime).

Driver's door panel

 Passenger door panel:

 Center tunnel (driver's side)

Close up of center tunnel (driver's side)

Extreme close-up of center tunnel (driver's side):

Close-up of the driver's door panel (this is the area where one might rest their elbow)

Extreme close-up of the same area of the door panel (note the 24 years of skin oils, dirt and grime embedded in the pores of the leather).

Can Leatherique's Prestine Clean get the leather clean?  Will the door panels ever look new again?  Will there ever be an Airplane III?  Will I stop asking myself questions?

Stay tuned as I answer these questions (well, most of them) in the next part of this series as I discuss the process of Cleaning and Conditioning the leather.