Build for autocross and track - the Warthog
 

As everyone was doing their family shopping for Christmas, we were shopping for upgrades and fixes for our new autocross, time trial, and track weapon. After being outgunned in horsepower for years in Caymans, we found a bigger gun for next season. The nickname for the new ride seemed natural as the last Cayman’ nickname ‘Piglet’ – the Turbo’s name is ‘Warthog’ – in homage to the A10s.
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Chris Fleming, the general manager of Cobb Tuning Plano, planted the Turbo seed last summer while we had our ’09 Cayman S on their AWD dyno testing some upgrades. He felt the 997.1 TT had a lot of potential for activities other than the drag strip and speed runs, and could be a viable competitor with the other big horsepower autocross iron (GTRs, RX7tts, Corvettes). Cobb Plano had prepped Turbo suspensions for other customers, and were impressed at how well they handled with the power upgrades available … those thoughts lingered as I went home with a not quite 300whp dyno sheet for the Cayman :(
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Our team (my wife and I)have moved through a few race cars over the years. Many seasons in Corvettes, and Caymans, with some Miatas and Minis along the way. We have a few SCCA Solo National Championships to show for all the tires and fuel burned, but it has been a few years and we are hungry again.
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On the long tow home from the 2015 Solo Nationals, the plan was made to switch to a Turbo for SCCA’s Street Prepared (bolt on) class. With prices (relatively) reasonable for 997.1 cars, it looked really attractive to start with that platform, recycle lots of our 987 parts, and build in GT2/3 handling, while keeping the AWD for launches and corner exits. There was also great romance in the idea of owning the last of the Mezgers. We calcuated the race weight to be a bit heavier than its competition (around 3300lbs) but the short wheelbase (12” shorter than a Corvette), torque and traction will work in our favor. Having fun with the flying pig references, our team name is now FliegenschweinRacing - Flying Pig Racing :D

Coming next ... found the car!

GL with the new track weapon…looking forward to following your story!

The Car
We found Warthog at a local specialty dealer, Texas Hot Rides – ’08, 50k miles, with some obvious track usage. It had a great stance with Bilstein damptronics, TPC swaybars, front camber plates, rear toe links, and pulled very strong – more on that later
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Chris @ Cobb Plano guided us on items to check for, and coached us on what noises were normal for the Mezger motors with their shop GT3. Now we just needed to get Piglet the Cayman prepped and sold – He sold in 3 days! The delivery prep took a bit longer, as we were saving our seats, rebuilding wheels and fresh maintenance . It turned into a couple of weeks of evening work, but the Piglet turned out great in his new street/track trim.
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Piglet now has a new home near Austin and will be frequenting COTA and Harris Hill Raceway – we will miss him, but he looks happy there!
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Now we could devote some time prepare for a test event in November. We had test mounted the CCWs from the Cayman the first night Warthog was home :cool: but some changes to wheel offsets and long wheel studs would be needed ....
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The First Test
We installed a set of Tarett competition wheel studs, and rebuilt a pair of rear 18x11 CCWs into 18x12s to mount 345/30/18 Hoosiers. Fronts were setup with 285/30/18s on 18x10.5s. The camber plates were configured for maximum negative (around 2.5 degrees) and I dialed in 2 degrees of rear camber – this is one of the keys to tucking the large rubber we will be running. Some moderately aggressive front toe out, and rear toe in was added, and swaybars were adjusted to minimize understeer. Oil was changed, and a sample sent to blackstone for analysis. We were ready to have some fun now!
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We headed to an Equipe Rapide Test& Tune event at Mineral Wells, TX . This is a massive WWII helicopter training area, used by many clubs for autocross and time trial events. They had a skidpad, test slalom, and test course setup to get dialed in on. Of course the weather forecast was challenging, overnight freezeing temps greeted us when we woke up. Hopefully the frost will come off when the sun comes up…
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... it turned into a beautiful sunny day eventually. Su and I put in a dozen runs each, and learned a few things about Warthog:
- Launches were great, as expected. First gear runs out way too fast.
- The sway bars and springs were biased to understeer at low speed, the car ‘pushed’ around the skidpad and sweepers. Some of that may have been the 2 year A6 old test tires we were running.
- Slaloms performance was really good – very responsive to steering, and the back end got into the rhythm but never stepped out unless we were crazy with the throttle.
- AWD system was very unobtrusive, the car reacted almost entirely RWD like, which is great!
- Warthog ran all day without leaking, boiling over, or complaining in any way
- Now we can’t wait to get our new suspension and fresh tires on it!

We were too busy driving to get any video or action shots, that will come in the spring. I love the look of the big 345s back there. Will leave this shot as placeholder, next comes the build out for next season ....
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very nice! Looks like a perfect match - glad you are enjoying your new toy and good luck in future events - keep us posted on the progress! :)

nice! subscribed.

Awesome. Let us know what you decide on suspension.

Beautiful. Looking forward to your updates on suspension work.

Nice write up. Very cool. In between Chris at Cobb and Ira at Tarret you will have that thing feeling even better!

Baseline
We knew Warthog felt strong, but the baseline dyno was a surprise. With a stock exhaust, stock appearing boost levels, and no other indications of engine mods we were surprised to see 472/562. Looks like it still has a tune installed.
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The baseline weight was also recorded on Cobb’s setup rack. This is with stock exhaust, seats, battery, Nav and CD changer, rubber floormats etc. and about ¼ tank of fuel. It is better than we expected, spec weight for a 997.1 Turbo is 3495lbs, so we are close at 3508lbs.
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Cross weights were also very good, someone had set this up nicely before.
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We have at least 100lbs of weight reductions coming to help here, with some removals (stereo) and lighter exhaust, flywheel, seats, and battery, so look for an update on this in about a month.

Performance and Reliability Mods
Normal 50k maintenance items will be addressed first, belts, hoses, spark plugs, etc. Then
Coolant fittings will be pinned/welded and oil cooler elbows replaced.
For the drivetrain, we have proven parts in queue to help deliver the power. Aasco aluminum flywheel from Jordan’s project, a Sachs race clutch (764) from SamboTT@byDesign, Wevo engine mounts and a Guard LSD differential rebuild.
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The power recipe is easy. We want to keep things lightweight, so budget friendly 997.2 units will be used. Injectors will be upgraded to handle E85, do88 silicone inlet pipes, and Warthog will find a voice with a Kline 3 inch GT2 race exhaust with titanium mufflers (thanks SamboTT@byDesign!). After that, a range of Cobb tunes for pump, race gas, and E85
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It feels a bit strange having time to write about what we are doing because we usually too busy wrenching in our garage. For this first round, we are handing the keys off to Chris and the Cobb Plano crew to do the heavy lifting (or engine drop in this case) and dyno tuning.

Nice! I'll have to come check out your guys in person at the ER events..

That would be cool, we hope to have the car on the ground to test by the end of January. The first Equipe Rapide event will be in late Feb. There are also PCA DE events at Cresson in Feb and March.

But our main goal is the be primed for the SCCA Pro Solo series events. This is a year long , points championship, on faster, intense courses with drag strip starts.

This promo vid shows the key elements of it, and at around 0:50 you can see my wife Su in our '08 Cayman on the grid on the right.
The Cayman did well here, it would consistently 1.8 60' which gave us .1-.2 sec advantage on most cars, except the AWD rally cars and GTRs. We want to knock that down to around 1.6 without too much stress on the driveline. Will be testing Cobb's BOTL launch assist, and the no lift shift if it is available. On a Pro solo weekend the car will have to do around 35-40 launches! We will run 3-4 of these events across the country, plus the year end Finale for the Championship.

For those waiting, the suspension installment is coming... just taking some time to write up, as we plan document the non typical mods we used in the Cayman front suspension. And of course, this is all theory until the rubber hits the ground.

This is pretty cool.
I used to do a lot of solo racing in an S2000 about 15 years ago. I attended 2 nationals and it was a great experience.

I never thought the 997 turbo could be a competitor due to weight and the GT characteristics of it, so you have my full attention. My car is built for long corners and it does pretty well on short courses, but you guys seem to be pro's at this and look forward to seeing how well you can push this car and what the limits are.

I thought about getting SCHWEIN for my license plate at some point...hahahaha.

Cheers!

The Kline Innovation GT2 exhaust arrived today. Thanks Sam@byDesign for answering my many questions during the selection process. It is a beautiful 3" x-pipe, with 100 cell cats and titanium resonators. We chose this GT2 style for a different look, and wanted resonators and cats to help reduce sound meter readings below our 100dbB maximum. We will use the decat pipes for the events that are unrestricted.

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We will find out during the install if the 3.5" tips need to be re-profiled to match the bumper contours. I am liking the simplicity of this style.

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Weight (bathroom scale accuracy level!) is really good, 27lbs with the 100 cpsi cats. The decat pipes are 5lbs lighter. That fits nicely between the inconel and the stainless muffler versions

Pleasure working with you bud. Enjoying watching your set up

We used to think the same, but have seen other large and heavy cars now do well with good prep, current hp, and current tires. GTRs, Coyote mustangs, new gen Camaros, and Vettes. 400-500whp cars used to be rare in our sport, now it is common. The 997 will have a size advantage, and competitive power/weight, and better traction. It will never have Lotus Elise dynamics, but the shopping cart for GT car parts is so easy to fill, and this chassis in 2WD form is a proven competitor.