Help me soup up my boxster

[Jake Raby]

Up to now we had RUF and Farnbacher Loles on the high end for those with more money than brains and a bunch of unmatched aftermarket bolt on products from China that were hit or miss... mostly miss.

Nothing currently available is developed to the level that we are taking this program for all the models that use the M96 engine.

I am more concerned with coming up with cost effective combinations that can be purchased with the budgets of most Owners.

[kabel]

^A good business man and my hero.

I don't want my engine to blow, but if it does, I know who to turn to.

[23109VC]

Michael-

Flip open any car magazine and look at the cars that run the 1/4 in the 10s and 11s. Virtually no car made runs in the 10s. That is like Bugatti Veyron fast. There are cars in the 11s, and they are all very expensive and MAJOR hp cars - 500-600+. That is ZR1, Z06, Ferrari, Lambo, etc territory. Your boxster was never meant or made with the goal that it be a speed demon.

cars are purpose built tools. As a simple analogy - you wouldn't take a shotgun to shoot at a target 250 yards away, and you wouldn't take a .308 bolt action hunting rifle to shoot skeet....

you don't take a boxster to the drags, and you wouldn't take a Mustang Cobra on a set of twisties... you can do both with each - but the boxster will lose bad at the drags and then leave the Mustang in it's dust on teh twisty mountain roads....

Ask yourself this: What do you REALLY want? Do you want a car that mashes you into your seat and blows people away driving light to light? if so, sell your boxster now and buy a big V8. Go buy a used Z06 - a C5 or C6 Z06 are insanely fast out of the box and can be made into seriously fast cars.

The boxster is more of a handling car. You can make it marginally faster iwth bolt ons, and the only way to make it substantially faster would be to swap motors which is going to cost you $10k+, and even then you will still be nowhere near as fast as an 11 second car if you are after straight line speed.

There is no right or wrong answer. Everyone likes something different. Just remember, no matter how fast you make your car, there will always be somebody faster.

As I've aged (I'm *only* 36), I've come to learn that it is more fun to have a car that is "fun" to drive versus a car that is "fast". Fast does not equal fun.

"Fun to drive" is a holistic factor. It's nothign you can measure with a stopwatch or a G-tech. It is something that you ONLY know from sitting in the drivers seat and taknig the car for a spin, and it is totally subjective.

FOR ME - the boxster is one of, if not THE, MOST FUN cars i have ever driven. If you want fun, you have the right car.

[mikefocke]

"I am more concerned with coming up with cost effective combinations that can be purchased with the budgets of most Owners."

More than what?

Maybe, with the K&N, the recommendation shifts to clean the filter every ?k miles and replace the oil every ?k, and with that the particulate buildup would be tolerable. Please do base your recommendation on your tests and give us some more insight into what your oil tests and tear-downs reveal.

Learning is half the fun. Driving the other half?

[Jake Raby]

"I am more concerned with coming up with cost effective combinations that can be purchased with the budgets of most Owners."

More than what?

More than catering to the 5% that has a budget of 5K for a couple of bolt ons from a company that has a huge name, but hardly any comparative data.

I'd much rather make progressive packages that people can afford to apply one item at a time and still end up with a known performance package in the end.

Maybe, with the K&N, the recommendation shifts to clean the filter every ?k miles and replace the oil every ?k, and with that the particulate buildup would be tolerable.

Exactly. And that would depend on the atmosphere the car is exposed to heavily as well. In a metro area there isn't as much dust and etc as I see here in my rural area with a dirt road to traverse daily. Dust is THE HARDEST thing for an air filter to collect and it collects faster than anything else.

Please do base your recommendation on your tests and give us some more insight into what your oil tests and tear-downs reveal.

Thats all I will do. I learned long ago not to condemn a product or process until my own eyes and data have proven that it is not acceptable, that said, I do test everything very objectively and everything is guilty until I prove it innocent. I do not and will not allow other people's experiences to cloud my development and half of what we have developed for all Porsche engines would not have existed if I had "listened" to reports from others or their recommendations about what works and doesn't work.

Learning is half the fun. Driving the other half?

Learning is half the fun, perfecting it is the other 49%.... To me driving it is just proving what we have developed and thats only 1% to me...

This is all a challenge, thats the only reason why I ventured into this engine in the first place.

[renzop]

There's an old adage in racing circles "Speed costs, how fast do you want to go?" Basically a 300hp iBoxster s available right now new from Porsche - it will cost you about $70K and have a 4 year warranty. It still won't turn 11 second quarters.

Or you can get a 300hp Boxster by dropping in a different motor or turbocharging your existing 2.5L. Either method is going to cost you $10K and neither comes with any warranty.