Project : Boxster R

In its plain white color my Boxster GTS 4.0 looked quite understated and elegant. Although I felt my car could be dressed up a little for a more polished look without going overboard toward a flashy appearance. I am generally indifferent toward carbon fiber but do like the contrast it provides to a a light colored car.  Upon some research I came across an Asian company named Frog Venom. They make direct replacement carbon fiber parts for Porsche 718 cars. While still not exactly inexpensive, their parts did not feel to be prohibitively out of reach. I ended up getting the following: 1. Weissach style hood 2. Sideview mirror covers 3. GT4RS style side air inlet covers 4. Spyder RS style ducktail  5. Rear diffuser It took a few weeks for the well packaged parts to arrive but once I received them I was generally pleased with the quality. I'm sure Porsche OE carbon fiber parts are made to higher standards but I think these Frog Venom parts are decent quality for what they cost and...

The rationale for the thoughts and ramblings in the following chapters is to document my path to making as perfect of a driver's car that I can within my means and enjoy the process of this pursuit. The intended audience for these chapters is no one else other than myself. These chapters are more of a reference for the future and a consolidation of my decisions and reasons and timelines. Someone who lands on these pages by accident or as result of a a keyword search, may or may not agree with my thoughts or reasons or decisions. And that is totally OK. To the person who disagrees with me, please do what you like or prefer. You'll find joy in that. Just as I am finding a lot of joy in my project Boxster R . Next Chapter

After the first drive in my car with MCS 3-way dampers and Dundon's geometry improvement parts I knew it was a fantastic start and I felt that with some tweaks to MCS settings and car's alignment I could make it feel even better than it already was. Mike Kojima of MotoIQ is an expert at this and I watched several of his videos and read his articles and took notes as diligently as if I was back in school and preparing for an exam. The man is a wealth of knowledge on these matters and I followed his nuggets of wisdom to the letter. Went out for a few drives and made adjustments to various settings one at a time. Each time I would go drive a section of pavement where I felt the OE dampers and suspension were lacking and each time I made tweaks to either High Speed Compression, Low Speed Compression or Rebound. After about eight iterations, I felt I got it dialed in.  So, today I went out again to drive my usual 60 mile twisty route. I drive this route very frequently so I am extre...

So ... after such an extensive and expensive suspension upgrade the question remains - a re the MCS 3-way dampers and other Dundon suspension components worth it? Prior to my decision to get MCS 3-way when I was researching, I came across a forum post where someone described MCS 3-way as  "they change gravity" - I was intrigued. Today after coming back from my first hour long drive in the twisties and over some terrible sections of pavement, I now understand what that poster meant.  I was quite afraid that perhaps I might have made a very expensive mistake but not only am I relieved, I am actually a bit proud to have taken this leap of faith. This car has now entered a different category in terms of capability and enjoyment. It was already a very very good sporty car and is now an exceptional sports car. This car is now worthy of the Boxster R moniker. The word visceral is over used when talking about cars but visceral is what this car is now. Not harsh but visceral. With r...

In 2 years of ownership I felt that Boxster GTS 4.0 has a pretty comfortable suspension most of the time but whenever I encountered a road section with successive bumps/waves/ripples, the car would not feel planted and would become a bit unsettled/unpleasant even at 60 mph. Also even being moderately aggressive in tight hairpins would cause the car's rear to hop/skip/shudder sideways. Not a drift, just an unpleasant juddery behavior and my way to avoid this has been to be less aggressive in hairpins. Boxster GTS is extremely enjoyable, but I wondered if these shortcomings could be dialed out to make it even more enjoyable.  I shared these concerns with Dundon and they diagnosed  bump steer being  the issue with car's behavior in the rear. My  car was likely steering the rear away from the direction I wanted it to go. They  said their suspension setup package would help but the main fix would come come from the powerful MCS 3 way damper package. Dundon recommende...

I think every endeavor to shed weight from a sporty car must inevitably come to learning about the importance and advantages of shedding rotational mass versus unsprung mass versus static mass and usually wheels are the first stop on that journey. I am no different. I measured the standard Porsche wheels that my Boxster GTS 4.0 came with, to be: Front: 23.34 lbs and  Rear: 25.16 lbs With the desire to shed some rotational mass I started exploring magnesium wheel options. They are twice the cost of an aluminum wheels of the same design, so they can be quite expensive. There were a couple of magnesium wheel options that promised shedding up to 6 or 7 pounds per wheel but  I ended up ordering a set from VT Forged as their prices were a bit more reasonable. It took a few months but in the end when the wheels arrived, they looked very nice. I was happy when I weighed them to be: Front: 17.7 lbs and  Rear: 20.34 lbs So, front wheels ended up being 5.64 lbs lighter and rears 4.8...

Anyone in the pursuit of shedding weight from a sporty car is eventually presented with similar choices. Some of these choices can be quite expensive and questionable while others are relatively less so. For me, these choices were the low hanging fruit toward making meaningful improvements in making the car better. Antigravity Li Battery: Lithium batteries have been used by manufacturers, including Porsche, to lower vehicle weight. I've known about Antigravity batteries for years but never bought them for any of my prior cars. I guess I was not trying to create a feathery Boxster R then. But now an Antigravity battery was an easy choice to make. It is a direct and easy replacement for the OE battery and resulted in a whopping 37 pound weight savings for the 40Ah variant. On a pounds-shed per dollar scale, no other modifications is more effective than a Lithium battery. And the fact that Antigravity batteries have a way to start a car that has the battery discharged, for whatever r...

Having a manual transmission in my driver's car is non negotiable. For me it is a key element of engagement with the machine. The tactile feeling of a manual transmission car's gear shifter is one of the things that we experience constantly while rowing through gears up and down. Driver's romanticize over how the shifter in this car or the other has the best sensation ever. So, making this element better can only lead to more enjoyment. Shifter:  The stock shifter in 718 GTS 4.0 cars is very good, probably as good or better than anything I've used in the past but I did think about the shifter Porsche used in the 718 Spyder and GT4. The OEM part is readily available so I decided to go ahead and order the OE part and got it installed. I had used the original GTS 4.0 shifter for a few months prior, so I could tell that the shifter from GT4 had slightly better sensation of the mechanicals and also a little bit lower height of the shifter itself for slightly shorter throws....

I knew before I bought the car that the introduction of particulate filters and restrictive rear silencer had muted the exhaust sound in 718 generation cars. Even so, after taking delivery of the car,  sound was the first thing I noticed on my very first long drive. More specifically the lack thereof.  I believe that a sonorous exhaust sound is an essential part of the experience of a driver's car.  Shifting by sound and not by looking at the tachometer is a part of driver engagement. I don't find it necessary to hit the rev limit as long as I am enjoying the sound. Unfortunately, Porsche's stock exhaust on the Boxster GTS 4.0 is very underwhelming to put it mildly. It just does not do justice to the car. Prior 981 generation Caymans and Boxster had a very soulful scream compared to the uninspiring exhaust note of my 718, drastically reducing the all-important fun factor of this otherwise fantastic car. So, it was immediately clear that I needed to rectify this. Upon rese...

I wonder what a good balance of power, torque and weight is?  The Morgan 3 Wheeler I owned and revered had only 82 horsepower and 102 lb-ft of torque and I still had to try to keep it from spinning rear tires at intersections. It weighed only 1200 pounds and the amount of power and torque was just about right for it. I could enjoy it without breaking speed laws most of the time. It was always a thrilling drive.  In comparison, more powerful cars like the Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio with 505 horses and 450 torques and offered no thrills when driven at speed limits. Quadrifoglio was actually very thrilling but only well beyond posted speed limits. So, in my humble opinion, exceeding speed limits is almost necessary to enjoy a car with such high capabilities and Giulia Quadrifoglio is not even remotely close to being among the most powerful cars these days. Ergo, most sports cars today are completely pointless if the primary use case is to drive on public roads and not e...

With a sense of my Boxster GTS's current position in the pecking order, I have some ideas about improving its rank - a "Boxster R"  of my imagination and an attempt to get a bit closer to the 993 RS car which is said to be one of the most engaging road going cars ever. On my Perfect Driver’s Car scale (Chapter 5), cars with scores of 90+ (out of 100) are decidedly out of reach for me, they are  "unobtainium"  and I can only admire them and live vicariously through videos. But I feel the Boxster GTS 4.0 platform has such a great foundation that it lends itself well to some score improvement. Porsche already has higher variants based on this platform, like GT4 and GT4 RS and even aftermarket shops have done 4.5L and 4.7L bore engines, and the chassis has been able to handle the significant power increase, based on all accounts. Although power increase is not my objective. So, climbing a few steps up the proverbial ladder from 72/100 to perhaps low 80s seems feasi...

I wonder how my Boxster GTS 4.0 stacks up against the  crème de la crème the unobtainable driver's cars? And how can  I even compare such amazing driver's car that cost many times more than the Boxster GTS anyway?  It would have to be completely subjective. Perhaps having some kind of points based approach might be reasonable for such a subjective comparison. So lets go down this path... Based on my personal criteria outlined in prior chapters (2, 4) my points based ranking would look something like this: This is clearly not an exhaustive list but it includes cars that I have a lot of admiration for perhaps lust is the more appropriate term, and I think the order of the list is a representation of the pecking order. In my opinion the GMA T.50 is currently the pinnacle of automotive engineering and the closest to the hypothetically perfect driver's car. Other cars I mention, I've assigned scores progressively lower in comparison to the T.50. Since there is 0% chance o...

 A Perfect Driver's Car does not exist but what would be some characteristics that would make such a car if I had the magical power to build one?  Admittedly this is highly subjective and totally based on personal likes/dislikes and bias. For me, here are some features that would make my "perfect driver's car": 1. Special Engine: Something like GMA T50's 11500 rpm v12 beast or Singer DLS's 9000 rpm (Williams Engineering) flat six or Porsche Carrera GT's 5.7L V10, or a Ferrari 458 NA V8. 2. Exotic Exhaust Sound: Something like Ferrari F355, Ford GT, Carrera GT or Singer DLS 3. Light Weight: It would have to be below 2500 pounds (Singer DLS, GMA T50 are sub 2200 pounds, 993 RS is 2800 pounds, 911 ST is close to 3000 pounds). 4. Communicative Steering: Something like the hydraulic steering rack of a Lotus Evora GT 5. Visceral Handling: Trick suspension components to do their magic yielding sublime, visceral, connected handling. 6. Sublime Manual Transmi...

With the Boxster GTS 4.0 meeting my criteria to the tee, I was super happy to have a car that blended my favorite characteristics from my prior cars. I had never driven a Boxster before I bought it sight unseen, putting all the faith in my criteria and I was rewarded for having such confidence. Right out of the box I was very very pleased. Boxster's mid engine balance was the very first thing that confirmed I had made the right choice. This was something I liked in Lotus Evora GT and Boxster felt even more like a mid engine car, perhaps due to the fact that Evora has a large supercharger sitting quite high where as Boxster's packaging keeps the weight tucked low and centered even more so than the Evora. Driving in the canyons, I loved how I could go through turn after turn after turn with such poise and balance. Fantastic! Boxster's 4.0 liter naturally aspirated flat-six was the next thing I immediately felt at home with. I prefer the build toward a crescendo and that's...

I love cars and over the years I've owned my fair share of cars. I say it's my vice, and luckily my wife loves me despite this admitted character flaw. Among  a smorgasbord of fun cars these cars influenced my likes and dislikes the most: Morgan 3 Wheeler: one of the most fun and visceral automobiles ever  Giulia Quadrifoglio: an Alfa with a Ferrari 458 v8 (minus 2 cylinders)   Lotus Evora: the most sublime hydraulic steering feel  Mini John Cooper Works: small and zippy hot hatch BMW M3:   sometimes a chassis just can't handle the power  Porsche 911 4S Cabriolet: purity of naturally aspirated flat six Fiesta ST: highest $ to fun ratio in a small and light weight package ND Miata: small, light and nimble is where its at Audi S5 Cabriolet: a forgettable bloated soulless hunk of a mistake With my preferences becoming apparent over time and ownership, my definition of a just right fun car (for me) emerged to be the following: open top exp...

To enjoy driving at legal speeds ... what a novel concept. Is there an even remotely sporty modern car capable of providing a motoring enthusiast the engagement and thrill of driving without tripling or at least doubling the posted legal speed limit?  Car makers are consumed by silly 0-60 mph times and the horsepower race. Cars with power of 500 or even 1000 horses. Where is this amount of power supposed to be used? Utterly pointless since there aren't any unrestricted speed roads to exploit such capabilities, at least not close to most municipalities.  And just to be clear, this is not about racing cars intended for track use or point-A to point-B cars i.e. vehicles that are meant for general transportation. This is all about point-A to point-A cars that motoring enthusiasts drive just for the love of driving. When legendary car designers like Colin Chapman emphasized "Simplify, then add lightness"  and Gordon Murray when asked about the next big leap for automobil...