After

Before

Google Photos Album of all pictures

The backlight on the gauges of my 2001 Ferrari 360 Spider went out, so I could no longer see my RPMs, temps, or speed when driving at night. This is a known issue with these cars, so I bought a replacement backlight and installed it. The part (purchased here) was $165, and was a pretty difficult install. Update - don’t buy this part. It worked for just one day, and I couldn’t get a refund on it. The part from EL Panel in the UK works better.

Seb’s Supercar on Youtube has a great guide on removing the gauges, which I followed. My 360 is manual, so I didn’t have to remove the F1 paddles.

Before starting, move your driver’s seat all the way back, you’ll need the room. And then turn off your battery with the switch in the frunk (and prop your frunk open with a towel).

Next, remove the steering column surround, with 2 screws under it, and pop the lower then upper cover off of the car.

This is a good opportunity to clean these up, as the typical Ferrari sticky buttons apply to the steering column surround. I find that makeup wipes do a great job of removing the stickiness. I used 10 wipes to clean my surround.

Next, drop the steering column by removing 2 nearly hidden and impossible to get to 8mm bolts. Remove the closer bolt, and just loosen the further one, this will let your steering column drop a bit. These are located on the left of your steering column. This was the most difficult part of the entire project for me.

There are 4x 3mm Allen key screws to remove on the front of the cluster. Put a towel over your steering column to avoid scratching the gauges, then you can finally remove the gauge cluster.

Unplug the 4 connectors on the back of your gauge cluster to remove it from the car.

The gauge cluster is very simple to work with once it’s off the car. You don’t need to remove the back (electronics side) to replace the backlight, just the front. I did remove the back, if you want to see what is under there, check out my Google Photos Album for this project.

Remove the aluminum part with 4 silver screws. Then you can remove the aluminum cover.

Under that is 6 black screws to remove the black gauge surround. The clear covers over the gauges will probably separate, but it’s easy to find which goes over which gauge. I’d clean both sides of these while they are out of the car.

Next, remove the needles from each gauge carefully, I used a microfiber cloth and a trim removal tool.

Next, then remove the gauge faces, they have some tape on them so be careful. I also used a trim removal tool here.

Then you can replace the backlight that is under them. Make sure you seat the new backlight plug well, I messed up and didn’t plug the new backlight in all the way on my first attempt, so I tried a dry fit without fully assembling the gauge cluster on my second attempt.

Make sure your gauge faces are on correctly, or else your screens will be off center. Also make sure your needles are on the correct gauge. The longest needle goes on the RPM gauge, not the speedo, as I accidentally found out.

Red goes on top, and the new backlight cable will stick out a little bit on the end, but will be covered by your dash. Then just re-install in reverse order. Make sure you clean out the inside of the gauges well - the first time I re-installed, I noticed a hair fell in there.

This part works great and looks just like the factory green lights. Some people swap in a yellow Speedo gauge, but I couldn’t find any that matched the stock fonts and would have the same color backlight. Some people also paint the needles red, like on the Challenge Stradale but I just left them stock.

In the last month, I removed the gauges from both my Ferrari 360 and Suzuki Cappuccino. Suzuki designed the removal process much much much better.

Update: My first EL panel from Amazon broke, then I bought a used OEM panel that was never tested and was also broken, so I bought a new part from EL Panels in the UK.

This is the OEM, Amazon, and ebay panel from top to bottom.

The transparent red connector is the Amazon part, the non-transparent red is ebay.

I noticed there is a tab to cut out next the the EL panel connector, so I snipped that with some pliers.