01 Oct 04
The 308 GT4 always suffered by comparison with the car it replaced, the 246GT. Judged in isolation, however, it was and is a fabulous junior exotic - the perfect 'starter' Ferrari if you like, although I detest the phrase: it sounds like you're buying a cut-price Wimpy home on a flood plain rather than splashing out on a supercar.
The bland styling of the Mondial was always going to consign it to the bargain bucket of Ferrari history and the early versions didn't have enough performance to pull you out of bed, but there comes a point where they have got to be worth having.
West London Italian exotic specialist Colin Clarke has worked, or even owned, all the bargain Ferraris. "The 400 is a great car for the money," he says, "and they are fairly bullet-proof mechanically as long as you can make the water stay in the engine. They usually go wrong if they don't get used enough. Yeah, they rust, but so does almost everything else. I suppose the nice thing about them is that by modern standards they are not that complicated a car."
He's less sanguine about the Mondial. "They had all sorts of electrical problems. In some respects they were wrong from the start. But still, at the right money... What you've got to remember about all these cars is that you might be buying it for £5000 or whatever, but you are really running the equivalent of a £150,000 car in modern terms, so you can't expect to run them on Mondeo money."
