Okay, slight correction. Street pads are definitely wearing the fronts more, track pads seem to be about even so far. Street pads really didn't enjoy that first track day, that could maybe account for the extra front wear. Again assuming front and rear started the same thickness.
Swapped pads on the rear and the one front I've done the lines on. Rears were 2-4 minutes per side, front was ~6. Not sure the time difference is huge but it was way simpler and less stressful. So I'll call that a win.
Well it's been a while but largely because not much interesting has happened.
I did another pitt race track night back in july I think. With some setup tweaks the car felt a lot better and I felt like I was driving better but it was about a thousand degrees outside and the grip just wasn't there so I couldn't manage to go any faster.
Last weekend I drove it up to toledo for an autocross, as I was pulling out of the site to go home the car nicely informed me that the left front turn signal bulb had blown out. I didn't actually know there were any incandescent bulbs in the car, so that was an interesting way to be corrected on that. Replacement is super easy but involves popping out the headlight. The process is straightforward but a little bit finicky to actually get right.
Of course the bulbs are a weird uncommon size meaning the cheapest replacements I could find were $17 for a pair of tiny bulbs. Happily I didn't cheap out and just buy one because I checked the other side out of curiosity and it looked like it was moments away from burning itself out as well:
This friday was the SCCA track day at mid ohio that I try to go to every year; getting the car prepped was a lot easier with the new front brake lines. Working fairly casually it took a little over an hour to swap brakes and wheels, including pumping up the track tires and cleaning off the street wheels. Not too bad, it took almost as much time to gather all the various stuff that I take with me and stuff it all into the trunk.
My main takeaway is that my brain (and also my body) is still working to adapt to the capabilities of real track pads. Pitt race has more braking zones I think but none of them are as long or high speed as mid ohio's back straight. That's were most of the time I picked up came from, but I also struggled to do it consistently. But overall the car felt really good. It was a little bit pushier than I'd like but not enough to bother making any changes, really it just reminded me that I still need to work on trail braking and being patient on throttle application. And that I really should have put adjustable front control arms on it last winter.
This is technically my second fastest lap, but overall the best driving, just with a few minor mistakes that offset the time gained elsewhere. Not the best trip through the back straight braking zone but decent. The car I'm following is driven by a friend that was instructing at the event. It's a base 981 with basically full STU prep plus takeoff race slicks. He had a student with him so I doubt he was running totally full speed but i still felt pretty good about being able to keep up with him.
I knew the front rotors were probably on their last legs coming into this event so I had been keeping an eye on them throughout the day. I had already pretty much decided I was going to skip the last session of the day when I went and checked on the brakes and found this, so that made my decision for sure. Stupid drilled rotors.
I figured I'd be putting rotors on it this winter anyway, but I'm still on the fence about what direction to go with it. Looks like rockauto rotors have gotten expensive lately, so the "just feed it cheap rotors" plan is looking less appealing.
So I packed up and left, and when I got home these were waiting for me. I'm getting really good at buying next year's tires before the end of the current season. But someone was selling a pair of lightly used 305/19 rt660s for basically free and I couldn't resist.
I hadn't looked super closely at the car most of the summer and hadn't noticed just how much rubber and other junk the extra wide track tires had deposited down the side of the car over the course of the season. Between that and how much brake dust was on...basically every surface I spent a few hours cleaning and waxing it.
Then I was bored so I put the car to a very different type of use...bike hauler. The photo also kind of shows how shiny and clean the car is at the moment.
So back at the last track day I finished off the rotors. I bought new ones a while ago in case I decided to do the last track day of the season but didn't, so I never put them on. I've been driving the car a decent amount lately, and was slightly confused about just how much noise and vibration the front brakes were making. Then I pulled them off and took a closer look and it started to make sense.
The inner faces had major high points opposite the cracks on the front side - one on the driver's side, two on the passenger side. Yep, that explains it.
Some more close ups of the carnange:
Anyway, out with the old, in with the new, some sebro slotted rotors which should hopefully hold up better and not be so prone to cracking.
Not much to the install process now that I've done the caliper studs and flex lines. Compress pads a bit, remove caliper, hang the caliper from the lower stud so it's out of the way, remove rotor. Cleaned up the hub faces which were a bit rusty and cleaned some of the more caked on brake dust from the backing plates while the rotor was off.
Wheel back on and went and did some fairly gentle brake bedding. Seems like the pads have some waviness from the old rotors that needs to work itself out, but everything feels and drives fine. Hopefully these hold up better. It's really nice having brakes that don't feel and sound like the front end is trying to shake itself apart again.
I need to do those flex lines on my 996 turbo. Eventually do the caliper studs too...
Finally getting around to doing some winter upgrades. The only real annoyance I have left about tracking this car is the seat, namely my lack of ability to stay still in it. As much as I'd like to do a race seat and full harness, it's just not in the cards. This is still primarily a street car and I don't want to ruin the normal driving comfort. Plus adding shoulder straps requires a harness bar which requires cutting up the interior which I'm not interested in. I briefly looked into what it would take to swap in a race seat just for track days, and it's enough effort that it's not worth it. Then I had an idea...conveniently a couple of places make harness mounts that attach to the stock seatbelt locations and maintain the stock belts as well. So I'm going to use those to run an additional lap belt. The stock belts will still provide the actual safety, and the second lap belt will hopefully keep at least my butt planted in the seat better so that I don't have to readjust after every corner.
I apparently forgot to take a photo of the parts pre-install, par for the course.
The outer side attaches to the car and is pretty easy, no real disassembly required. This one is still free to rotate somewhat easily and can store down out of the way. When in use the angle isn't really ideal, but again I'm not expecting to get any additional safety out of these, just some extra tightness.
The other side is a bit more complicated, it's seat mounted and there's absolutely zero clearance to the tunnel, so the seat has to be removed. I didn't want to mess around with unplugging the electrical connections and risking upsetting the airbag system (and the seats are surprisingly large relative to the door opening) so I didn't fully remove it, just managed to shift it around enough to get clear access to the side. Bonus, in the process the car gifted me 23 cents and a couple of small pieces of old food, so that was nice.
Here's this side installed
And with the addition of a zip tie since the stock wire retention piece no longer fits (Side note, as far as I can tell that stupid little piece doesn't exist on any parts diagram or in the shop manual seat belt removal instructions and seemed to be pretty well stuck on which was annoying. Ultimately I decided I didn't care if i broke it since I didn't need it anymore and attacked it with a screwdriver and discovered it just pops off with pressure applied in the right spots. Still would have been nice to at least have a mention of it existing in the shop manual)
Torqued everything up, put the seat back in, and this is what it looks like installed. It's a little bit more visible than I had hoped but realistically any shorter would make it super difficult to attach a belt to and it doens't get in the way for normal use.
And the full setup, as best I could manage to photograph it:
Now I just need to decide on what lap belt I want, but I've got plenty of time for that.
The other main upgrade I have planned for the winter is adjustable front control arms. Of course the only place that sells a complete kit for a reasonable price is out of stock and their customer service doesn't like to reply to messages. So I'm going to end up ordering the parts separately from a couple of different places and might end up having to make a couple of small pieces myself. It should end up cheaper (and more GRMish) overall but more annoying.
If you can find one, a CG-Lock would do what you're looking for.
I've been using a $3 seat belt lock clip since I started tracking my car. I set it up tight enough that I have to move the seat back, put the belt on, and then slide the seat into driving position. I'm not moving around, well at least my hips aren't going anywhere, with it on.
While not as cheap as that Amazon one this is what I've been using in my S2000 and E90 BMW and it works really well and super easy to install and remove: https://www.cravenspeed.com/cinch-seat-belt-tensioner/
Yeah.... As a PCA tech inspector I'm not thrilled with your idea there.... I'd run the CG lock or just the 3 points, or proper 5/6 points.
As usual plans change and I haven't done much with this lately. I got sucked into running a pretty complete autocross season with some friends (in a different cayman oddly enough) so my energy and budget for doing anything on my own has been pretty low. On top of that I was too late ordering track tires and the latest expected delivery date is August. So at the moment I couldn't really do anything if I wanted to. I would still like to get a track day or two in at some point but I'll have to either wait until closer to the end of the season or try to dig up some used tires or make do with what I have on hand. The schedule is pretty busy for the next couple of months but opens up a bit towards the end of the season so it might just all work itself out.
The local autocross region is hosting a few week night autocross events this year. The first one was last week which I did just running on the street tires. It was fun but it was immediately clear (as I dnf'd at the first braking zone...oops) that 5+ year old worn out ECSes aren't up to the task of even casual autocross. So that's another thing to start shopping for. The next week night event isn't until later in the season either so I've got time to figure out what I want. Or depending on finances maybe I'll hold out until next year.
As the weather's been finally getting nicer I've been trying to drive it as much as possible but I just haven't had a lot of places to go. The brakes (I think specifically the rears) have been getting squeaky, sometime I'll take a look at it and see if there's anything noticeable happening and probably grease the pads some if there's nothing obvious.
Today a spectator shared some videos they took at that night event. Of course the video they got of me is the run that I basically demolished the back half of the course. But that just adds to the entertainment value of the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdLYT7LCwvg
I'd look into the Cobra Nogaro seats. They're a street focused bucket seat, fully compatible with the OEM 3 point seatbelts.
I'm looking at getting one for myself but pet related finances and changing desired direction for the car, it's not in the books for me for a while. They're a slick seat though!
Well...it's been a while here. Not a ton to report though. I ended up spending all autocross season driving other peoples' cars, so I only ever did one event in my car and never had enough free time or money to make it to any track events. Could be worse I suppose. However I did spend the latter half of the year really testing out the "do it all" nature of the car. Around the end of june I had a run-in with a deer in the fiesta, the car sat at the body shop waiting for parts until mid-october, at which point I sold it pretty quickly before the bottom totally dropped out of the used car market. So from july through about a month ago (actually exactly a month ago today) the cayman was my only vehicle. So it spent a lot of time looking like this:
...only usually much dirtier, thanks to the gravel parking lot that it's sitting in. Overall it worked out pretty well and the initial experience gave me the confidence to put off replacing the fiesta as long as possible to wait for used car prices to come down as much as possible. This was the first year since owning it that it's needed two oil changes in a year, which was an exciting milestone of sorts. But I'm also pretty happy that that's over now.
Partially spurred on by needing to rely on the car more, I finally got around to replacing the super dead 2017 era tires. I went with DWS06+ (visible in the above photo) after a good experience with them on the fiesta, and partially hoping for an excuse to have a bit of fun in the snow with the car. Overall it's been a similarly good experience. The tire change made the car a bit pushier, and I'm pretty sure it's because of extra rear grip, not less front grip. Which is a good indication of how dead those tires were, that new performance all seasons have more grip than used performance summer tires with ~half the treadwear rating. And they seem to drive basically the same regardless of weather conditions, which is nice. Come spring/summer I'll probably stiffen the rear sway bar a step, but for now this setting is good a tiny bit of extra cold/wet weather safety.
Now that I have a second vehicle again and the roads are pretty consistently salty, it's time to do some winter work.
I've wanted to replace the exhaust for a while; one or both of the mufflers have a few small leaks and it just doesn't sound great in normal driving - light throttle, low rpm. But this is one of those semi-rare cases where the porsche tax is very real, so even though the "catback" is two mufflers and about 4' of tubing, aftermarket replacements are expensive and people seem to think takeoff stock ones are just as valuable. I'm also secretly old and really don't like overly loud exhausts and am not tolerant of cruising drone at all, so that kind of limits the options some. If I had a bigger budget I would have retrofitted the factory valved sport exhaust, but that's like $2500 in parts plus a trip to the dealer to get the mode switch programmed in, not worth it to me. But over the summer I happened to stumble across someone on ebay selling a modified stock exhaust for super cheap. I think I didn't even know this existed at the time - it's called the Carnewal GT mod. Basically the exhaust gets cut open, some removal/modification of the internal baffles is done, and then it's put back together. No outward signs of modification, but a supposedly freer flowing and definitely better sounding and only slightly louder exhaust is the result. Sounds perfect, so I snapped that up and it sat in the corner of the basement until I had the time and motivation to work on it.
Now...the problem. Porsche is generally really good at corrosion resistance as I think most people know. But...apparently nobody told the exhaust group that. This car spent the first half of its life in the northeast, and while most of the car held up nearly flawlessly, the exhaust seriously suffered. That would be the source of the various small muffler leaks that initialed all of this. So this job wasn't going to be as simple as just "unbolt, remove, reinstall". The mount hardware was in good shape, the only rusty bolts that needed to be dealt with - while on the car at least - were the four studs and nuts in the flange at the exit of the catalytic converters. At first glance those actually looked like they were in okay enough shape that they might come apart normally And in fact the thread interface was still okay, but the nuts themselves and the exposed stud threads were rusting away from the outside so getting any traction on the nuts was a challenge. Add to that the fact that the flanges are in an awful location to access - stuffed in between the strut, knuckle, axle, and control arm - and things get extra interesting. One nut I managed to hammer a one size too small socket onto and break loose. Another, the universe had already removed for me in one way or another, which was nice...of course that was also probably contributing to the exhaust leak. The final two, which of course were the "inner" nut on either side and therefore the hardest to access, were just not going to be removed normally. The best I could come up with was to break out the reciprocating multitool and dig up a narrow metal cutting blade, and slice up the nuts until the remains were able to be hammered off of the studs. That took a lot of effort but eventually panned out and I was able to release the assembly.
I had originally intended to reuse those exhaust tips (the "new" muffler didn't include one), so then I had to separate the two mufflers. Happily, now out of the car with good access and not needing to reuse any of this stuff, I could use much more brute force in dealing with the fasteners. The clamp bolts on the exhaust tip were actually still intact enough that they just broke loose with an impact, one crossover bolt snapped immediately with impact application, and the other actually came loose. Somewhat visible in the above photo, there's a clamp on either pipe that attaches that mount bracket. Those bolts didn't look that bad but didn't respond to the impact, so the clamps just got cut off. This is the hardware carnage, along with the pile of rust that resulted from knocking the two mufflers apart:
With the mufflers out, the last challenge was to extract the studs from the catalytic converter flanges so that they could be replaced with non-rusted and/or sliced up hardware. That actually went surprisingly well with just a cheap tie rod removal press and some creative spacers. As you can see in the photo above, one of the studs actually ripped the mounting base off of the flange rather than pressing out of it. The replacement hardware is actually bolts rather than studs, so that didn't cause any issues.
I had originally intended to reuse the stock exhaust tip, but the more I looked at it, it was just more rough than I really wanted. And it cleans up decently but seems to return to looking awful almost immediately with use. Conveniently, I came agross another ebay find of a relatively cheap takeoff GT4/sport exhaust tip, basically the same part but with a black finish instead of chrome, and in much better condition. I didn't love the black finish at first, but I figured worst case it's going to turn black anyway, at least the difference won't be as noticeable. But now that I have it and have seen it on the car, I really like the look. It's not as deep black is it seemed, in the installed photos below it actually looks almost like normal chrome, though it's definitely a bit darker than that in person.
"New" parts loosely assembled and ready to install:
There's way too many degrees of freedom in this assembly, so getting it all aligned correctly once up in the car took some effort, but eventually worked out. Replacing the studs with bolts made the initial installation process much easier I think.
And installed, on a very dirty car because I didn't get the chance to wash it before parking it:
There was a quick break in the weather after some rain where the roads were clear, I used that as motivation to get this finished so that I could hear what it sounds like without having to wait another month. And yeah it's definitely a big improvement. Maybe not quite as aggressive as I hoped but definitely much better sounding expecially at high throttle/high rpm, and barely any louder than stock in normal driving conditions. Cruising on the highway it's a bit louder, but not drone-y, just a bit higher volume. So all in all a total win I'd say. As an added bonus, now when it eventually needs a clutch I shouldn't have to spend a week just dealing with removing the exhaust.
So now it's back to sitting in the garage waiting for the next break in the weather to get some driving time in. I think this summer's experience is going to motivate me to drive it a lot more this summer, ideally basically any time that doesn't involve bike (or other large item) hauling duties.
I put a Carnewal GT on my 987 after owning the car for a month. It's just a bit louder and deeper. It sounds better but still has a positive spousal acceptance factor. LOL!
FWIW: I tried selling my stock mufflers for a few months. I finally gave up and gave them away.
I did the same type of exhaust mod on my previous RX-8. It made a huge improvement in sound and I got pops when I shifted 
. But it didn't drone at all on the highway.
Nice work!
I also had a Carnewal exhaust on my previous 987.1 and it was a perfect amount of sound without any annoying drone. Newly acquired 987.2 came with a Cargraphics exhaust and it might be a little too loud for me so I've been piecing together a stock exhaust setup as backup; already have a set of mint mufflers (thanks CAinCA!) and the t-clamp.
This car was from East Coast and, while pretty much everything underneath is mint, from the cats back things are a little crusty including the bolts between the cats and muffler so spent some time a few weeks ago replacing them as I was refreshing the rear brakes. Luckily the cats and manifold studs/nuts look to be in great shape so won't have to worry about those.
I'm enjoying this thread. Two years ago I bought a 987.2 (2010) Cayman S for the same reasons you got your Cayman S. It took months of searching before I finally found mine on BaT. I couldn't believe it when I won the auction! Like you, I had a Boxster before getting the Cayman.
I've only been able to do a few track days, but it's really fun to be the guy passing, and not being passed. It's been used for quite a few autocrosses with the local PCA chapter, and I have managed to win one. The nice thing about the PCA events is that you can tell people that the only cars that beat you were Porsches.
My eye has been on a Carnewal GT muffler, so it's interesting to hear your opinion on it. Please keep posting about your experiences!
Where in Ohio do you live? I wouldn't consider DWS06's as snow tires, but I lived in the lake effect band of Cleveland. I've always run separate snow tires/summer tires on all my cars....
The weather has been very....Ohio lately, so I've been able to put some miles on it; the exhaust is still awesome. Today's 70* drive included a stop at the bank to make the final loan payment.
One final winter (spring?) upgrade and then I'm hopefully done wastefully spending money at least for a few minutes. I've never really liked the stock steering wheels on these cars, I think the newer style wheel from the 718 is much better looking. I've had my eye out for an upgrade for a while, but figured I'd never be able to justify the expense. Well, sometime earlier in the winter I came across a too good to pass up deal on a new style airbag, which then prompted me to search a bit more intently for a wheel. And a month or two later I found a good enough deal to talk myself into doing it. This style wheel was actually used on basically every porsche for a few years, but "no extras" wheels like I need are hard to come by as most of the cars that got the wheels have PDK paddles, multifunction buttons, or both. The wheels are very modular and can pretty easily be reconfigured but some of the parts are expensive. The upside is with no electronics to deal with the new wheel and airbag are a direct swap. I ended up with a lightly used wheel from a 718, manual and no multifunction, but with sport chrono which means it has a little mode control switch that needs to be removed. This requires swapping the main trim piece, which I was able to find relatively cheaply used as well. So this is what I started with:
Step one: disassemble everything:
I also took the opportunity to clean and condition the leather while it was all apart.
Step two: reassemble:
Then just pop it on the car (and nervously reconnect the battery and hope for no airbag light). No photos of the install process but it's very straightforward. Comparison of the two wheels:
The new wheel is basically a refined version of the old wheel with a less obnoxiously giant airbag. Much better looking and less intrusive.
Before:
And after:
On this week's episode of "I can't settle on a long term plan"...I've had a pair of GT3 adjustable front control arms sitting on the shelf since last summer. I bought them basically just to have them since OEM arms went out of production recently and I came across a decent deal on a pair of lightly used ones. I've been hesitating to install them for a number of reasons.
Earlier this year some friends talked me into doing autocross week with them. I don't know if they would allow three drivers in a car...but none of our cars have more than two seats anyway so that means I have to/get to take my own car for once. Over the winter we added some front camber to their GT3 and that made a honestly pretty surprising impact on its performance. So all of that came together and I decided (within the last week or two) that that was enough motivation for me to go through with the control arm install.
So I did that over the weekend. It was...about as much of a pain as I expected, which is one of the reasons I was hesitating to do it initially. Then on top of that, the tie rod lock nuts (which I've worked on twice in the last 3.5 years of ownership) were pretty well seized in place...worse than when I first aligned the car after it presumably hadn't been touched for the first 5+ years of its life and several northeast winters. So that was frustrating and took some PB blaster and quite a bit of effort to break free. In reward for dealing with that, my second attempt at the alignment on basically an educated guess on top of an educated guess for the toe setting turned out basically perfect.
Not really worth any photos because the job is conceptually simple, just a lot of stuck fasteners and tight spaces, but here's the finished product, complete with coincidentally basically color matched camber spacers:
And the new alignment:
An extra 1* of camber, slightly more toe (was slightly in before) and...some amount more caster. I forgot to measure it with the stock arms before taking everything apart. This is something I might revisit. Part of what I wanted out of this was more caster and the number doesn't seem too extreme (stock range is 8.2*+/-0.5*), but the wheels are somewhat noticeably forward in the openings now. The control arms have two bolt holes for the caster arm to attach to; I think the other hole might be too big of a change in the other direction. Something to keep in mind and play around with in the future. For now, at least on the street on all seasons front grip and responsiveness seem noticeably better. I'd like to be able to use the extra camber to be able to soften the front sway bar and run the whole car a bit softer to make it a bit more forgiving, but we'll see how that pans out. I've got a weekend of normal autocross events before autocross week starts that I'm going to basically treat as test and tune time.
This is why I put in the Cervelli caster blocks on my GT3 arms....
I put a set of Tarett GT3 spec arms on my 987 and wound up using 16mm of spacers. I used the front hole on the arms to keep the castor basically where it was before. My alignment wound up almost identical to yours. -2.4/-1.8 camber, zero toe F and -.05 total in the rear (the toe adjustment is maxed out). I've been really happy with it.
More castor is usually recommended for straight line stability and high speed sweepers. If you're not doing track days I'd think you'd be better off staying near stock.
I'm at 13mm of spacer. My thinking is a couple of things. #1 more caster = more camber when turning, I'm trying to strike a balance between having good tire wear and grip for track/autocross without running a ton of static camber and blowing out the inner edges of the street tires in normal driving. #2 if I'm picturing it right, more caster makes the sway bar motion ratio more progressive, I'd like to be able to run the whole car a bit softer on initial rate so this should help to be able to do that. And #2.5 along those lines it should help unload the inside rear tire and free up the rear a bit without having to stiffen the rear sway bar. But this is definitely a test and I'm not opposed to moving to the other caster setting in the future. Realistically this car will probably see more track than autocross anyway so a slightly track biased setup isn't the worst thing.
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