6SpeedOnline - Porsche Forum and Luxury Car Resource

I've been quiet for quite some time, but I think it's time to start talking about it. I've never been a big fan of forum threads were the authors spend a ton of time talking about what they are going to do with their cars. Enthusiasm is great, but I'd rather talk about what I've done vs. what I'm going to do.

In September of 2015 I had a catastrophic foreign object ingestion incident (F.O.I.I.) which is also known as a foreign unknown car kniblet -- or (**********). We were installing a IPD plenum the night before Mitch from Cobb came in to tune my car. Suffice to say, there was no tuning the next day. Zero compression in two cylinders made sure of that.

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Whenever this many people are inspecting your engine you know something is wrong.

Big thanks to Mitch Mckee and John Hebbeln for seeing me through such tough times. I felt horrible because they had flown in to work on the car and get some numbers, and here I am with a broken car. Certainly not my best moment. We towed it to Cobb Tuning Plano and diagnosed the problem (above photo). Two cylinder's worth of valves were ruined.

Thusly, the quest for more power had officially begun. To be fair, I have been attempting to ruin perfectly good cars by making more power for years -- so I had a pretty narrow set of requirements for such a project. After moping around the house in a state of nearly pure sorrow for a week or two Mrs. Rix agreed that the 911 would be made great again, and that budget was secondary. That was probably her first mistake...

I attemped unsucessfully to get quotes from BBi for an engine build. I wanted to do a 3.8L engine, stock crank, forged rods, forged pistons, etc. Previously I had always operated in a world of staged upgrades, so I wasn't entirely thinking of the big picture at this point. However, after 2-3 weeks of not being able to get solid answers or quotes out of BBi I gave up on them. With the recent (at the time) build progress of Anthony Taylor's 997.1 by John Bray at EvoSpec I decided to go with them for the work.

My experience with BBi can be summed up by saying it took them 14 months to ship me a set of exhaust tips. I'm an easy going guy, I don't get worked up about things. The exhaust I had purchased for ~$5k was poorly packed and suffered a large amount of shipping damage. This was slightly before my foreign unknown car kniblet issue, but I got great initial support from Betim @ BBI. Beat it with a hammer, make it fit for your race, we'll make it right later. Well, I had been trying to get a detailed quote for an engine build from BBi for several weeks. I know they do great work but I just couldn't get their attention. What I didn't know at the time is that it would be an additional 10 months+ before my exhaust tips were shipped. If they can't send me exhaust tips, how can I do an engine build with them? I'll probably take some heat for saying it, but that's how it happened.

John Bray at EvoSpec communicated well, was knowledgeable, and motivated to make things go. I originally broke the car in September of 2015. Cobb Plano dropped the engine for me and diagnosed the damage. In October 2015 I decided (probably out of pure idiocy) that the proper course of action was to rent a van, name it "The Terminator" and deliver the engine to Evolution Motorsports in Phoenix AZ myself.

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Loading the 997.1 full engine assembly into the Terminator.

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