Yes, it was an ascc event. You can see the course in the video but it is kinda almost like a mini road course...if the road course is exclusively 90* turns and all the same radius. This one was much closer to a "normal" autocross course and was probably the most fun I've had running with them. Despite the open straight in the middle of the course, top speed was actually at the end of the starting slalom.
Beautiful car and nice thread. I got a black 2015 Cayman S with PDK back in October to use as a part-time daily, mountain runner, and "gentleman" track day car for when I don't feel like trailering and flogging the Spec Miata.
Took it up to the Six Gaps here in GA yesterday with my buddy's matching white Cayman S and my other buddy's new M2 comp.
I traded cars with the M2 guy for a while, and while it is also an awesome machine with a touch more straight line power, I left feeling that the Cayman is a much better car for my needs. After 7 months of ownership, I still can't believe how good it is at... everything.
Wheels and tires are tough though, as you mentioned. My car has the 20" Turbo wheels stock; I picked up a set of the ubiquitous 987.2 18" wheels for track duty, saving some money on tires and maybe leaving a bit of performance on the table. Still trying to decide on track pads. I did a track day on stock pads and they were actually fine, although they wore quickly. Still, at 1/3 of the price of good track pads, I might just run them and change them more often.
Having now done the brakes I wouldn't be surprised if most of what I was feeling was the old dirty fluid. Though I'm not sure what quality the front pads were, pretty sure they weren't oem. The R4S have been good so far and your experience makes me optimistic they'll be good for track use. I don't know how much oem pads cost, but these were under $250 for the full set which seems pretty cheap for a performance pad. Wheels would be a lot easier if I didn't have a ruleset to adhere to. Figuring out tire clearance if you're trying to go wider gets tricky because there really just isn't that much space available.
Since you mentioned the M2 comparison, my friend with the GT3 cross shopped...almost everything in the performance car world before deciding on the GT3. Corvettes, Camaros, M2, Caymans. He thought the 718 had the best chassis of any of them, especially for a car that would also see street use. And almost decided to order a 718S or GTS but wasn't thrilled about spending almost GT3 money on a car that would likely lose 50% of it's value in a few years. He went the GT3 route, and I went the already depreciated Cayman route.
I’ve driven several 981s (they’re great) but have never driven a C7. Given that they go for similar money, I’m very curious to hear a comparison from someone familiar with them both.
Wow- those R4S are cheap! I need to give them a try, about the same price as OEM Textar pads. When I looked at the Pagids and PFC's I almost fell out of my chair- like $800 for all four corners. They're also known to be hard on rotors, and the stock drilled rotors are known to get thermal cracks between the drill holes on the track. The "right" solution to that is GiroDiscs, but there's another $2k. Maybe my next setup will be those R4S pads and the Sebro slotted (not drilled) rotors that FCP Euro sells.
Any plans on doing the LCA's to get more camber? That's also on my list, but $$$. I think I got too used to Miata prices on everything.
nderwater said:I’ve driven several 981s (they’re great) but have never driven a C7. Given that they go for similar money, I’m very curious to hear a comparison from someone familiar with them both.
I drove the 981S, the C7 GS and the Camaro ZL1 before deciding on the 981. I actually had the ZL1 ahead of the C7. Both of the GM cars are faster than the Cayman on the track, straight away. I've seen a bunch of C7 owners having heat issues at the track, haven't seen it with the ZL1. Both of the GM cars are a handful- just felt big and unwieldy to me. By comparison the Cayman is not as fast but is easier to drive fast, if that makes any sense. Tha balance is perfect, the steering and brakes are surgically precise, and you can toss it around without the car punishing you too badly for your mistakes. I have two friends tracking 981's pretty hard and so far they've been as reliable as a hammer. The Cayman also looks way nicer and the interior is superb. In the end I had a problem dropping that kind of coin on a GM product, as good as they are.
How much are those 981s?
I got mine CPO with a clean Carfax and a great option package from a dealer, so I'm sure I overpaid compared to the OP. There just aren't that many of them out there, especially well optioned. I was in the high $40's.
mr2s2000elise said:How much are those 981s?
Assuming S, if you want the cheapest one you can get, mid-$30k range is doable but it'll probably be a stripper model pdk with a fair amount of miles. A manual with decent options and reasonable mileage is realistically low-mid 40s. Dealer, CPO, etc will add more as shinnygroove said. Mine was a mix, manual with decent options, but higher mileage and a bit of a rough history, sold private party at the worst point in the year to be selling a car like this and was in the mid-30s. With better timing and a bit more effort put into the listing, I think the PO could probably have gotten closer to 40 out of it. The cheapest one I could find quickly right now is a $38k pdk with 60k miles and a weird but kinda decent assortment of options (including an alcantara steering wheel which I didn't know you could get on the S).
Awesome
thanks guys. So $38-45k, would get a manual trans ?
appreciate the help
$45k and a bit of patience should get you just about any spec you want.
Got some overnight parts from Germany yesterday in the form of a GT4 rear sway bar and bushings. Well, expedited shipping from germany takes a week, and then fedex screwed around with it for a few extra days once it landed in the US, so it really took two weeks to get here. But it's the thought that counts.
Figuring out which bar I wanted took a surprising amount of effort. What I wanted was something with a noteworthy rate increase over stock, with some amount of adjustment range and ideally the ability to be adjusted close to stock, for situations where I don't need or want the extra rear end looseness. Most of the aftermarket options are (understandably so) intended to be paired with an upgraded front bar and tend to be super stiff as a result, which I was afraid would get me into a situation where even the softest setting was stiffer than I wanted. Lots of people on the internet have had good experiences with the X73 sport suspension rear bar (about a 30% increase over stock) on base or PASM suspension cars like mine, so that seemed like a reasonable target. The X73 bar is cheap but doesn't have any adjustability so I went looking for something better.
Porsche is really weird about what information becomes public knowledge. The sizes and rates of the sway bars along with spring rates for the normal models are well known as they were published in a porsche magazine as a comparison between the different suspension packages. Spring rates for the GT4 are well known, but the bar rates...complete ghost town, even the sizes weren't super clear from information I could find. Eventually from doing some more research and getting information from some aftermarket suppliers I managed to suss out at least decent approximations of the rates of all the options and put together this table:
My car is the PASM + PTV combo, so it has the stiffest non-X73 bar a manual Cayman S could be equipped with. As it turns out the stock GT4 bar centers around the X73 rate and is adjustable. It's a little bit pricey but cheaper than any of the aftermarket options, sounds like a perfect fit. I would have liked more adjustment range, but I think it'll be fine for now. Looking at the options the CMS bar is probably a better choice long term, but it's significantly more expensive and seems to be only sold in a pair with the front bar which doesn't fit my budget desires at the moment. But given that they were the only supplier that both answered my questions in a timely manner and was willing/able to provide hard numbers, I'm inclined to give them some business if I ever go further with suspension upgrades. I find it interesting that the GT4 has substantially stiffer springs but only minor increases in bar rate. Oh and I was bored enough that I put together a chart for the front since nobody else I could find had ever complied this data:
Here's the GT4 bar compared to the stock bar, they look pretty similar and are nearly the same diameter, but the GT4 bar is solid versus the stock hollow bar so it's noticeably heavier.
Installation was pretty simple. I found a new use for my trusty old FM frame rail jack adapter to turn the rear mount of the transmission skidplate into a jacking point. Looking at the framework that supports it my initial thought wasn't exactly "that looks like a thing that can support 1600lbs", but it's pretty commonly used and the only alternative is putting the entire car in the air so I figured I'd try it.
Then I took it out for a quick test drive. Transitions are a bit hard to test safely on public roads, but it does seem to be a touch looser so that's a good sign. My local SCCA region's first event of the season is this weekend so I'll have a chance to test it out. They usually run morning and afternoon sessions so I'll bring the tools needed to make adjustments in between sessions if necessary.
About 5 years ago, someone in the building where I worked bought this same car. It's a beautiful color. This got me thinking about an upgrade to my MSM. So I started checking local listings for 987.2s, preferably an S. I finally found a non-S in a darker blue on a dealer lot with 70k miles and test drove it. The hook was sunk, but I had the same experience as you. There just weren't any available for a decent price even after expanding the search. For now, I'll live vicariously through you. Enjoy the car.
Well, saturday's autocross was pretty much a disaster, but I did learn some things. The course and surface are very different from the first event so comparing the two was hard to do. I knew that going in but forgot just how different it was. The event format ended up not being very conducive to testing setup changes which didn't help either. Then the changes I made all went in the wrong direction and I didn't really figure that out until my last run of the day. The course was tighter than normal for this site which made over driving the car very easy. And with limited front camber and tire (and way too low tire pressure) that results in a lot of bad times and cones hit (I'm blaming this on the wheel spacers, the only evidence of cone hits I could find was a couple of scuffs on the wheels). Driving wise, my first run was probably the best, where I started with reasonable tire pressures and wasn't trying to pile drive the car though the course. But amongst all that I'm pretty sure the sway bar was a positive change and I have some ideas for the future, especially now that I know that low tire pressures are definitely not the answer. My best raw time would have been good for sixth overall pax, but with a substantial gap to the leader. And with events the same weekend at both grissom and pittrace, the competition was a little thinner than usual so I really should have been able to do better.
But it was definitely worth it to get back out to a local event, have some fun driving (even if it was infuriating at the same time with all the problems I caused myself) and hang out (from a good, safe distance) with some friends that I haven't seen in a while. This was the first time that the cayman and my codriver's GT3 have been in the same place.
He ended up taking top pax for the event, so at least one of us remembers how to set up and drive their car. Happily the next events are only two weeks away.
Lately with lots of free time I've been getting distracted trying to work out future plans, namely wheel and tire setups for track use and if the cayman ever gets classed in STU. Something else on my radar for the future is scca time trials. All three potential rulesets (or lack of rules, in the case of track days) are open enough that the only real limit is what's able to fit on the car. A few weeks ago I took some fairly detailed measurements based on the wheels and tires I have to try to figure out what will fit on the car. I concluded that the setup that would use as much space as possible without risking hitting the fenders or having the tires poke super far out from the fenders was as follows:
front: 255 width tires, 9 or 9.5" wide wheels
rear: 295 or wide 285 width tires, 10.5" wide wheels
I'm also targeting an inch of diameter reduction from stock, front and rear. The current autocross tires are an inch shorter in the front and almost 2" shorter in the rear. While the gearing improvement is nice it looks a little silly and has the potential to cause handling issues.
Unfortunately, reality gets in the way sometimes. As it turns out, none of the 200TW tires really exist in a 295 width size. Well, a couple do, but they measure just as wide as 305s and I don't want to stuff a tire that wide onto a 10.5" wheel. Pretty much all of the 285 width options are either way too tall or way too short, and tend to measure narrow. Then there's the 315/18 and 335/18 rivals which are just way too wide. So that pretty much leaves me with the only easily achievable option being 305s on 19x11s. This setup should fit considering that it's the only option for a SS GT4, but I'm concerned that it won't look great and that that much rear tire will make it difficult to get the car balanced. So that makes me think the only real option for the front is to try to make 265s fit, another thing that I think will work but might not look great and might run the risk of a particularly large bump causing a tire to make friends with the fender.
There is some upside though, as 305/19 rivals are dirt cheap compared to any other 200tw tire in a comparable size, 18" or 19" diameter. This also means that I can share rear tires with my friend's GT3 (of which my part of our codriving deal is supplying tires) though since both cars wear out the rear tires first I'm not sure how helpful it is. But it does mean that I have used up tires sitting around for test fitting purposes.
So last week I was browsing ebay and came across a cheap pair of decent looking 19x11 wheels from a 997, with what should be the exact perfect offset. My math says +41 is the lowest offset that will clear the suspension, these are +51 which when paired with the 10mm spacers I have results in +41 net offset and gives me some room to play with to get the fitment perfect. They arrived today:
They're a little bit more beat up than the photos showed, but for the price and their intended use (which may well just be test fitting) they're more than good enough. The offset marking s are a little hard to read and there were at least a couple different offset versions of this design wheel made, but my highly accurate tape measuring of the backspacing worked out to exactly 51mm offset, so I'm pretty confident they're as advertised. I'll toss one on bare later this week as I'm swapping tires for the autocross events this weekend. If that looks like they'll fit, I'll toss some used tires on them and see how that looks. Then I'll have to figure out the front situation from there.
Wheels fit about as expected, a touch more poke than I was hoping for but good enough to see what it looks like with tires. The widest part of the tire should be just wider than the wheel face, and the tread should come about to the inner edge of the bead surface which is just barely hidden behind the fender profile. I'm a little concerned about fender clearance but I think the tires are small enough diameter that they should stay clear. This is at approximately the correct ride height:
On the inner edge, my measurements and math worked about perfect which made me feel good. About 3mm of clearance to the strut and a bit more to the toe link:
Man, that was a long weekend but so fun, rewarding, and educational in a bunch of ways. Local scca region had back to back events, it's been a while since I'd done a full weekend of autocross, plus I helped out with course design/setup friday and saturday evenings which made for a particularly long day on saturday.
It seemed like a lot of my troubles from the last event were from going the wrong way on tire pressures. So I dug out a tire crayon so I could see how much the tires were rolling over and jacked the pressures way up. At the first event I settled on 27/30 hot pressures. At the second event I started there and went down which was clearly a mistake. This time I started at 28/30 cold and let them work up to 30/32 hot which was where the tire rollover got to a place I was comfortable with. And.....the car was phenomenal, if a touch looser than I would have liked. It also helped that the course was much better overall and a lot less painfully tight than last time. I ended up with pax FTD for the morning session and because we had to make a slight course change for the afternoon session, I'm calling that my first official pax victory.
It was a bit damp in the morning and once it was fully dry the DS and GS civics took over on what was pretty heavily a momentum course, but I still had a scratch time that would have landed second overall and Ryan in the GT3 had a scratch time that would have taken the win. Here's the video of my fastest clean time for the day:
With the tires sorted out the car was fast and fairly controllable but a touch looser than I would have liked and was difficult to be precise with car placement and wasn't overly confidence inspiring in a lot of places as a result, so I decided to back off the rear sway bar a little. I was so worn out after saturday that I ended up making that change on site sunday morning before the event.
Sunday Ryan and I decided to treat as a test and tune of sorts. I experimented with tire pressures a bit more in the morning and for the afternoon session we swapped cars for a few runs and then went back to our own cars for the final run of the day, where we both went faster than our previous best but hit cones. The course was even more momentum friendly than saturday and a bit dirty in a few places from gravel/rubber cast off by the previous day's event so we struggled even more to keep up with the civics and awd cars despite both of us feeling like both our cars and our driving were better. The sway bar change seems to have been a minor improvement, this may just be as good as the car is going to be on these used and slightly beat up tires. My last run had a cone but the time would have been good for fifth overall:
At some point during the day my external mic came unwedged from the seam I stuffed it in and was just bouncing around loose in the trunk so the sound is a bit funky on this video.
As far as a comparison between the cayman and the GT3, they were surprisngly similar in some ways and surprisingly different in others. The GT3 is absolutely a more "raw" driving experience but I'm now thoroughly convinced that the cayman was the right choice for my situation.
Mounted up some trashed 305/19 RE71Rs over the weekend to test fitment on the rear. Fit is about as expected, a bit more poke than I was hoping for but decent looking:
Tossed the camera on the rear fender and took it out for a drive to check fender clearance. This was the worst I could accomplish, appears to be at least 1.25" of vertical clearance still and it looks like the top of the tire is arcing in a decent amount:
So I'm pretty sure that will be fine. These tires are pretty much only good for test fitting and I still need to figure out a matching front fitment so it'll be a while before this setup sees any track time.
Got some sweet action shots from the previous event, this is my favorite:
Last weekend I got the chance to get out on a "real" autocross surface, Toledo concrete. Wasn't sure what to expect from the car so I left everything as is but planned to run higher tire pressures due to the extra grip. Most cars get tighter as you add surface grip, but the GT3 got looser and I wasn't sure which way the cayman would go. As it turns out it acts more or less like a normal car and gets tighter. If I had more time and energy I would have made a bar change between runs but it was hot and dragging a jack halfway across the site in a hurry didn't interest me so I left it alone and figured out how to drive around it. Took a few runs to acclimate to having to be patient and really park it in a few spots to get the front end to hook...and also to get the rear tires hot enough to unstick a bit. But eventually I managed a time good for third in pro-street tire class and 14th overall of ~120, which I'm pretty happy with especially since there was still at least one mistake worth a few tenths on that run.
Four events in and the car is driving about as well as I could have hoped for and is honestly more competitive than I expected. The only annoying thing is it's being pretty hard on the outer edges of the rear tires, seemingly even more so than the fronts. As it sits now the rear alignment is essentially untouched from stock, I think I'm going to add some camber and take away a little bit of toe and see what happens. Hopefully the two offset to result in about the same low speed handling balance and a bit more even tire wear, without ruining high speed stability or tire wear on the street.
My cayman smokes the inner 3/4-1" of tires in the rear at stock camber so I think you will be OK. Regular agressive driving.
I haven't seen any of that on the street tires but the autocross tires do have a little bit of inner edge wear. They're used though and I don't remember how much of that was there from the start. I usually hesitate to trust the Porsche hivemind but some internet research tells me that pretty much everyone that tracks their 981 is running more than stock rear camber with no issues. I'm thinking like 2* and a little less toe in.
Tweaked the alignment last week. Couldn't get as much camber as I wanted. Rear was 1.7/1.5* camber and .13" total toe. Now 1.9/1.7* and .10" toe. Doesn't feel any different on the street, we'll se if it does anything for tire wear.
Went for a drive on some fun/scenic roads near my house over the weekend. Got bored enough to stop and take some photos for once:
Another stack added to the wheel and tire collection (there's also three other tires hiding in a closet):
Managed to find a set of used enkei nt03+m wheels in 18x8.5 and 18x9.5. Not sure the 8.5s are useful but the whole set was cheap enough to justify it just to have another pair of 18x9.5s. They seem to be in good condition, currently equipped with some giant 11 year old snow tires. I kinda like the design, unfortunately they don't remotely match any of my other wheels:
I guess this is a milestone of sorts? Seems appropriate for this moment in time...
The rest of this isn't directly cayman, but is related and involves actually building stuff, so why not?
My Fiesta ST was great at hauling tires around when all I had to deal with was miata and fiesta tires, but stepping up to wide-ish 18" wheels and tires has started to expose its lack of interior space. The last time I took tires to get mounted stuffing everything in was a real pain and culminated in snapping off one of the little pegs that the rear cargo cover sits on. The other one had suffered a similar fate a while ago and at the time I happened to have enough random hardware to cobble together a stand in. But with no such luck this time I decided to take a few minutes to draw up and 3D print more elegant replacements for both. These use an M8 bolt and fender washer through the hole conveniently left by the broken off stock piece to attach to the panel:
And installed:
At the same time I decided I was tired of dealing with stuffing the interior full of tires, breaking interior panels, and being left with no visibility while driving. I stumbled across an effectively brand new hitch on craigslist for a third of the price of new, and took that as a sign from the universe. After installing it and a trip to harbor freight for a hitch adapter and a cargo carrier (assembled backwards and offset forward to get the weight as close to the car as possible), this appeared:
The hitch is technically only rated for 150lbs. That setup as pictured is about 120 with the carrier, in practice I'd be keeping it to 100 or less. A quick test drive showed even that worst case configuration was fine as long as I remembered to slow way down for any speed bump type events. On the highway it's a bit noticeable if you get it rocking back and forth, but the car still feels far more stable than I remember the base model fiesta rental I had a while ago being, so I'm pretty confident in it. Even only putting two tires on it will free up a huge amount of interior space and rear visibility.
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