[Adam]

Originally Posted by z12358

YellowPorscheMan2002:
"Anyway, 217 HP is a little anemic, I gotta admit."

If it felt like that in May (and that's a big IF), the best bang/$ would have been getting an "S" then. Even now, switching your base for an S may still give you the best bang/$.

Personally, I have not been too much into mods. I may have too much respect for the designs as they come out of the factory. I'd feel pretty arrogant to question the optimality of a design that must have incorporated hundreds of engineers, designing, simulating, testing, having Monday meetings, then going back to the lab, all for the purpose of matching all the parts together and finding that sweet spot of performance and durability. So here comes Z and says: "You fools, you could have gotten 10hp more if you had programmed the chip this other way and 10hp more if you had the mufflers done this other way!" How would I ever know why they didn't design it that way themselves? Was I at the meetings? Did I hear the cons? What makes me think that some after marker guy in his garage could find performance where the original engineers couldn't?

There's a prevalent theme in the "mods" world that getting more performance is mostly a matter of how much money you are willing to spend. My take is that it's usually much more complicated than that: There are other costs involved caused by the cummulative effects of each particular "mod" through time to the car as a whole. Though the extent varies among mods, by modding, the originally designed optimal point has been shifted in the parameter space into a (for us) unknown space, and the risks/costs associated with that are usually underestimated. As usual, the collective wisdom aggregated in the market is telling us the same, as a heavily modded car is much harder to sell then its stock equal.

Just my thoughts.

Z.

Agree, but sometimes the factory purposely holds a car back. The boxster S could've had 280 hp from the get go instead of 250hp but Porsche wanted to bump up the power of the 996 first. The car got a 30 hp bump and they didn't even need to up the displacement. That tells me some of these engines have some untapped potential.