[PaulE]

Well I had a good run, almost 78,000 miles and 15 years of owning my 2003 Boxster S. Last Thursday I drove 440 miles from New Jersey to Mont Tremblant for an HPDE and the car ran like a champ. My club does tech inspection the night before each track day, so I drove over from my hotel to the track and cleared tech. On the way back to the hotel, my car sounded just a little rough, which I attributed to driving all day in close to 100 degree F weather. The next morning when I went to get my car, the valet started it and it sounded like a washing machine running full of rocks without water. No check engine light but it was bad enough that it was shut off and pushed back into its space. I took a cab over to the track and didn't drive. Two of the instructors there happened to be guys that own and work in my independent Porsche specialist shop, so when the track went cold they drove me back to the hotel. They looked at the car and then I started it and it sounded the same. Their conclusion, shut it down and trailer it home, there was nothing they could do there for the car.

So here I am stuck with a dead car over 400 miles from home, in another country, with no way to get my car back. They made an announcement the next morning at the drivers' meeting and members of my club stepped up. One member offered to trailer my car back and let me drive his 2010 GT3, which he trailered up, home. Only issue was he had no street tires. Another member had wheels and street tires in the correct size, which he was willing to lend to the owner of the GT3. The tires were some kind of street legal racing tires, they looked like slicks with some wide rain grooves molded in and very widely spaced apart.

The GT3 was stock with a rollbar and GT3 racing buckets. It was fun to drive, the seats were fine once I was in place but it was a pain to get in and out. It was also loud and a droned in 5th and 6th gears at 60-70 mph. I can now say that for me, who spends 99% of his time on the road and 1% on the track, a street legal race car isn't for me!

We took my car straight to my shop and put his GT3 back on the trailer so he could continue on home.

The shop did a preliminary look at my car and it looks like the oil pump partially failed and suffered from low oil pressure. I had replaced the IMSB with the LN single row pro about 35,000 miles ago, and I added a MantisSport deep sump when I started doing HPDE's about 2 years ago. They said there was only a minor amount of metal in the filter and in the sump, but I haven't given them the ok to start tearing apart the engine yet. I am waiting to hear back from LN engineering if they have any of those $8,500 sale engines left, the guy running that sale for LN is at Porsche Parade this week. My shop could also rebuild my engine but we won't know what parts it would need until it is torn down, so it will likely be less expensive if I can just buy a rebuilt engine. I have been dreaming about a 981 Cayman S for some time, but the timing is not quite right for that so I think I will end up fixing this car.

I'm really grateful to the people in NNJR who stepped up and helped me get me and my car home, particularly since I am a virtual stranger to them, only having seen them at a handful of HPDE and other club events.