Ferrari 360 Challenge Stradale Retrim - STG

This Ferrari 360 Challenge Stradale is owned by Sam, aka Seen Through Glass, who's become a familiar face at d:class in recent years. Previously retrimming his Ferrari 360 steering wheel, and his Porsche GT3 seat centres and door card centre panels in black and white Pascha.

Sam is back again with his latest purchase, a striking Ferrari 360 CS. A lovely upgrade from his 360. The interior looked a little tired from emails, so we invited Sam down so we could go through spec, materials, and dates. A decision was made to go bold! something uncommon but still remaining Ferrari. Everything red would be swapped out for a dark blue including stitching. The black Alcantara from factory had completely worn and faded, which ended up looking grey. Everything trimmable in this vehicle would also be retrimmed.

As there was a lot of changes for this project, we sent Sam a few variations in spec through our Render to Reality service. We played around with colours, materials, whether or not to change the wheel to Alcantara, keep Leather, or to mix things up a bit. A few emails back and forth and the spec was chosen.

Steering wheel: Black nappa leather top and bottom, black nappa perforated grips, blue Alcantara racing band, blue contrast stitching.

Dashboard: Black Alcantara dash top, blue Alcantara lower dash, tonal stitching.

Seats: Blue Alcantara centres base and back, black Alcantara bolters outers, black Alcantara centre stripe, tonal stitching.

Headlining + Bulkhead: Black Alcantara with tonal stitching where required.

The Ferrari 360 Challenge Stradale, launched in 2003, is the hardcore, track-focused evolution of the standard 360 Modena, essentially Ferrari’s road-legal homage to the 360 Challenge race car. It’s around 110 kg lighter, thanks to extensive use of carbon fibre, thinner glass, and a stripped-back cabin, and its 3.6-litre V8 was tuned to produce 425 hp, giving it a 0 to 60 mph time of about 4.0 seconds. One of the coolest differences lies inside, unlike the regular 360’s leather interior, the CS features bare carbon fibre door cards, minimal sound insulation, Alcantara bucket seats, and exposed metal details. Sam has big plans for this car, including a full exterior respray, which is currently taking place whilst we finished the interior retrim. This can happen as all of the trimmed items can come away from the cars chassis.

Another small but impressive detail was that we noticed all of the interior stickers had seen better days. We carefully removed these in order to scan them and created like-for-like recreations of the them. This involved the airbag warning, sunvisors, and fuse box stickers. Same sizes, fonts, spacing and print style were all recreated as Ferrari did from factory... which strangely we noticed huge inconsistencies. None the less we recreated those too. These are now available on our website to purchase or made to order for your vehicle. 

The steering wheel. One of the most important parts of an interior, a make or break item for sure. Sam desired to make the interior more to his taste, and the big top section being blue to mirror the previous red, seemed dated. This top section is now black nappa leather to match the bottom section with a nice little twist of a blue Alcantara band, tying in with the rest of the interior.

The icing on the cake with this retrim has got to be the seats. You wouldn't be wrong thinking these were an option from factory with how at home they look in the car. We photographed the seats at d:class but have since seen them in Sam's car via images and of course his videos showing the audience around the car. The black and blue Alcantara work so incredibly well and we are glad we went with tonal stitching, to keep things just that little bit more modern. With the variety of panel colours, adding contrast stitching would feel crowded. To finish these seats off, we recreated the Cavallino Rampante and had it embroidered at the top of the seats.

At the time of writing this, we have not yet had the chance to film the car completed, however we are in talks with Sam. We filmed the entire retrim process, so one day soo we will have another d:class video for you.