looking for your advice regarding engine break-in. i know the books on all my prior porsches called for 2,000 miles prior to full throttle use. sorry but i know i will not be able to wait that long. advice please.

 

Avoid short hauls around town...
A weekend trip to the Grand Canyon from So Cal is fun.
Do a Road Trip!!!

 

trundle - if all goes well, i will be taking the new car to the monterey historics in mid-august as its first road trip. my ship is due in to san diego on 7/21 which i hope will get me the car by 7/31 or so.

are you going to monterey?

 

Drive it hard out of the box- it will allow the engine to break in properly and will lesson the chances of the annoying smoke at start up these cars experiance.

As an FYI we run our race engines at full throttle from the get go!

What you dont want to do is go on a long trip and have the car run at a constant RPM you need to vary the RPM's and load on the engine both on accel and decel.

 

i drive from dealer to home.
the next day i am on track.
so it has about 200 miles of local traffic before track.
never had issues.

 

Easy, as Fabryce said don't keep it on a costant Rpm for a long time, you can go on long trips but have fun a bit, find a twisty road not a highway.

As for the engine, every gt3 engine is hot tested, meaning they take it to the max before fitting it in the car. After that they test drive the car to see if it is within standard. So don't worry about the engine.

What I have done is just for the first 400kms I took it a bit easy, a varied in rpm accel-decel. Bed the brakes in, and I noticed buy 150kms the clutch became a bit easier for some reason. Now Full throttle 550kms on the clock.

 

My opinion is that the 2000 mile thing is mostly to break in the driver...and maybe transmission. But I'll tell ya, they flog these things at the factory before they go in the car. Been there and seen it.

 

I have always been taught to vary the rpms on a accell and decell session. Never just run the engine for long periods of time at a constant RPMS

 

"Break" is the operative word here. If you want to keep you car for a long time, then be careful during the first few thousand miles. Again, like others said - constant RPM's for a long distance is a bad thing. Also, properly seat your brakes, depending on the type of brakes you have.

If you are like most Porsche owners, you can drive you car like mad out of the box, and then trade it in for next generation of 911 or other sports car in a few thousand miles and it will be someone else's problem down the road...

 

^I had no idea about this, but I definitely trust your opinion on the matter.

 

The only thing that the factory can't do is drive long enough in normal city conditions to allow the flywheel and clutch to mate. That's what the "no WOT" break-in period is for. As mentioned earlier, 200 miles of normal city driving will do, but 300-400 would be ideal.

 

but i don't think you've kept a car long enough to see if any issues.

 

Using the excuse that it's someone elses problem later is rather lame.

Owners go on and on about what has worked for them. For me it has and always will be the manual recommendations, varied engine speed, etc... Who am I, or anyone else -aside from a reputable racing engine builder with well documented results- to question what Porsche has recommended. It's not like Porsche's advice is going to do the engine harm.

Flame away, but proper break in for me. With that said, varied throttle, longer trips, load, unload the engine etc...

 

Here is what I heard from people close to Porsche... as other said, this is mostly to break in the driver. There is so many GT3 that ended crashing before 5,000 miles that Porsche wanted to slow down unexperienced drivers... I would be curious to know stats from someone who knows how many GT3 are still on the road when compared to total units produced at this point (996 + 997) ?

 

I would put about 1000 miles on it before I tracked it. The motor is mostly good from the factory as they Dyno it but you other parts in the drive train to break in so the easy warm up and miles help all the drive train components. At 1000 miles i was full boogie at the track.