rezanourai

I have a 991 GT3 that I normally track, and have been for a number of years. However, I wanted to pick up a second car for cheaper track days and more seat time, so I just purchased a 2000 Boxster S (hasn't been delivered yet). I've done a bunch of reading online already, and been searching both here and 986forums.com, and just trying to make a plan for getting the car track prepped by the start of the new year. I'm a moderate DIY'er for maintenance and easy/medium mechanical work, but don't have the gear or the experience (yet) of pulling engines or trannys. Here's the list I've pulled together of what I *think* I should do to the car before getting it on track, looking for feedback from folks who've put some serious wear on these cars. Also, any input on proper track set up would be greatly appreciated:

1. Don't have any records of AOS being replaced, so thinking of replacing as a precaution
2. Deep sump kit (I'm trying to decide between 0.5qt and 2qt LN kits. Is there something else I should be looking at? Are the worries of bottoming out on the 2qt overrated?)
3. I'll probably do an IMS retrofit before too many track days, just as a peace of mind. The car has 93k miles and never had the IMS issue, so part of me wonders if I'm likely good to go and should just roll with it
4. I'll of course do the usual DOT 4 and maybe swap brake lines or any other brake components needed as I inspect when I receive the car. Pads may need to go. I've heard Pagid orange are a good setup for this car? Any other recos?
5. The car is optioned with the optional 18" SportDesign wheels. Trying to figure out what tire setup to run. For compound, I've heard R888R (NOT R888), RA1, or NT01s are all great choices for this car. Anything else I should consider? There seems to be endless debate about staggered vs square setups My rims are staggered so at least the first few runs I'll do with just tires on these before looking at new wheels. But I don't like the understeer in my GT3, so I'm thinking I may dial out some of that here with 245F & 265 R? What other setups are worth checking out?
6. My plan is to get the car on the track and feel it out before adjusting too much on the suspension side (other than a track alignment to push as much camber as I can get on stock control arms), and then looks like GT3 control arms & some springs or PSS9 are in my near future?

Any other general tips on settings these cars up for basic track days, or advice on other advised maintenance I should do before hammering it would be greatly appreciated. To give some more context, my primary track car is my 991 GT3, but it's expensive to run that car more than 5 or 6 times a year. I want more seat time than that so I can improve my driving further (I'm currently barely running a 1:39 at Laguna) so I wanted a car that's fun to wrench on (as a hobby) and also can give me good seat time for cheaper than the GT3. I'm not looking to build a spec racer or do competitions, but this car won't see much street driving either. It'll be heavy duty track usage with just driving to/from the events. Is the stock roll bar enough? Should I do the Brey-Krause extension? Eventually I'll probably to the full cage + fiberglass skins all over to reduce weight, but not looking to go that crazy right away.

All suggestions and pointers welcome! Thanks!

Shawn Stanford

I did a couple of track days in my '99 when it had something like 175k on the clock. It wasn't track prepped, and I didn't do anything special to get it ready, and the car was fine. The only thing I would do differently next time would be to put better brake pads and a heavier oil.

If I were looking to make my Boxster into a dual-use car instead of 99% street, I'd go nose around and see what the Spec Boxster folks are doing. For instance: I've heard the hot setup for wheels is 17" square.

joseph mitro

for general track use, I don't think there's much difference to what you would apply to the GT3. IE, brake pads, tires and such - each has their own preference.

For my 99 that I recently sold, I had a 17x8.5 square setup with 255/40/17 RE71Rs. Really loved that setup; handled great, just so little power

Here's the Boxster specific things I would do:
I had the 2Qt deep sump with baffle, and never bottomed out.
center radiator (if not already equipped)
996 gauge cluster or some sort of aftermarket oil pressure sensor
BK rollbar extension
hardtop if you can find one
new engine and transmission mounts

good luck. Its a fun car to track.
I have the BK rollbar extension and GT3 control arms for sale if you're interested

rezanourai

Thanks for the pointers guys.

joseph: I'll DM you about the roll bar extension & possibly the control arms, thanks!

I am hoping to complete the car purchase this week and get the car by next weekend if everything goes smoothly. Then I'll get it up on the lift and poke my head around to see what basics need attention (fluids, oil, air filter, plugs, wheels bearings, CV boots, etc...) and whether the car has the third radiator & better oil cooler already (I think I read that all S cars should have both of those from the factory, but I'll confirm).

The Radium King

street car or track car?

brakes - stainless brake lines, pagid yellow pads, motul rbf600. gt3 brake ducts.
tires - nt01's are good. perhaps an a7 or r7 if you want to run track specific wheels. i run 245 front 275 rear.
wheels - most selection in 18"; widest is probably 8.5 front 10 rear; watch your offsets. btw, when it comes to wheels you can have cheap, light, safe - choose 2. the oz allegrita is a good wheel.
engine - underdrive pulley will get you some hp. 987 airbox will find a bit too. go full crazy and put a 997 plenum and 996 throttle body on (at which point, if you have the codes and a friend with a pst2, push a 996 tune onto it). pull the air conditioning - will reduce weight, get more air over the rads, and reduce parasitic load on the engine. get cheap chinese exhaust - headers, 'test pipes', muffler. again, will reduce weight as well. got big arms? go all in with a steering rack converted to manual; gets more weight out and less load on engine.
maintenance - magnetic drain plug, updated oil pump piston, new water pump, low-temp tstat, aos. get that friend with the pst2 to run your cam deviation numbers; perhaps time for updated tensioners and tensioner pads as well. 2nd gear drop-out detent. change your transmission fluid. check the boots on your halfshafts as they tend to year on the 6-speeds. as was said, get some gauges to monitor temps and pressures. do whatever eases your mind regarding oil pressure; accusump, x51-style baffle, extended sump. get your injectors serviced.
weight - gt3 seats (or some aftermarket equivalent; put some weight back in by adding harnesses and chucking the seat belts). pull the motors and whatnot for your roof as it works good enough manually. of course the stereo. ditch the airbags (opportunity to get a cool momo steering wheel too). if you care what your car looks like without airbags and speakers, you can find door panels on ebay.co.uk from cars that came without. front and rear bumpers are heavy. so is the charcoal canister and sai system. and carpet/insulation.
aero - boxster front bumper cover dumps all the air that hits it under the car. crazy, hey. a big part of that understeer you mentioned. you can get the air flowing through the side rads to flow into the wheel well instead by modifying the plastic behind the rads (there's a diy on the pelican website). the centre rad can be made to vent upwards like the gt3 but that is a lot more work. the spec boxter guys modify their rear bumper covers so as to not act like a big drag parachute (especially with s smaller aftermarket muffler installed).
suspension - strut brace in the front works, rear is a waste of money. swaybars are a good investment; hollow are lighter (ie, not H&R). lower is good so you'll have to decide bilstein sport with lowering springs (i think there are a few new options out there now) or full coilover. if you go for coilovers there's a wide range and if you ask opions folks will try to spend your money. once lower you'll neeed adjustable rear toe control arms to be able to align, and might start getting some bump steer so front tie rods as well. more camber is good, so once you've got the tops pulled in as far as you can (and the slots filed so that you can go a little further) and the bottoms pushed out as far as you can, then time for adjustable lower control arms. and at 96k miles, probably time to replace all the other control arms while you are at it. how stiff do you want it? time to decide what type of bushings are in all those control arms. speaking of stiff, good results can be had with stiffening the engine mount (probably needs replacing anyway) and the two transmission mounts (will probably not need replacing, but i got much more benefit from stiffening them than the engine mount). and, there's a thing called a pedro bar that stiffens the rear lower sub assembly.

if you still have any money left, get better shifter cables and a money shifter i mean short shifter. and an lsd or atb. lightweight flywheel and a sprung stage 2 clutch. deka etx14 powersort battery. and i am sure i'm missing a bunch of stuff.

rezanourai

Love it! This will be pure track car, and I'm intending on picking up a trailer and really gutting it eventually (probably next winter's project). Since I'm splitting my track budget between this and the GT3, it'll probably take me a while to work through anything close to that much stuff, tracking it in between as I go will help assess priority of what to do next at each step. My focus order while its still street legal (no trailer) will be safety gear, oil/temps/reliability, brakes, tires, alignment, suspension. Once I get it trailers, interiors coming out, fiberglass lw parts replacing metal, and working on aero

The Radium King

cool. pretty much everything i listed will keep your car street legal (uncomfortable, however). things like seatbelt and bumper deletes might put you in the grey area of the law. and a lot of it is diy or at least inexpensive. there's no way to avoid expensive when it comes to suspension, unfortunately, to the point where it is probably cheaper to buy a spec car with a dead motor just for the parts ...

rezanourai

Out of curiosity, does yanking out carpet & interior make the car technically not street legal? or as long as airbags, seat belts (not sure about harness?), and emissions are okay, is it good to go? Not sure where the fine line is here
I've heard (and there seems to be conflicting info on this) that it's unsafe to run a harness without airbags without also having a HANS device. Basically, you either run airbags & 3-point seatbelt or no airbags & harness+HANS. Given HANS isn't really something you'd drive on the street with, seems that chunk of work will need to wait until I have the trailer for it?

The Radium King

well, my dad used to drive around with a lap belt and me sitting on the dash holding his beer. no airbags, no abs, no intermittent wipers. we did ok. it's all about your risk tolerance. car doesn't need carpet or interior. actually better without - less flaming plastic to drip on you in a firey car crash.

standard 3-point seat belt is designed to let the body come forward a bit. to stop it whacking on the steering wheel they added airbags (like 40 years later). harness holds you in place but your noggin rattles around like a bobblehead so they added HANS (like 40 years later). the law? car needs functioning safety equipment as provided by manufacturer. has anyone ever checked your car for airbags before? will the guy doing the safety check know the difference between a harness and a seatbelt? especially if you only are using one of the shoulder straps? the local dmv guys certified my race car with a full cage (think about driving down the street with a full cage and no helmet - all kinds of terrible things for you to whack your head on).

harnesses and race seats are good for keeping you from sliding around in your seat in high-g corners. typical gt3 setup is to run both.

emissions, well, lots of opinions there. the bigger battle is to fight the nannies in your car that tell you when you've circumvented all the emmission devices (cats on your exhaust, sai delete, etc.). the key is to push a ROW (rest of world) tune onto your car. sets it up for euro emmissions standards (less aggressive that north 'merica) so that you don't get a check engine light. and, depending on who you talk to, also fools the local inspectors.

Byprodriver

Install ARP rod bolts incase you miss a gear shifting!

berni29

Hi Radium King

Im very interested to hear you say that a rear sway bar is no advantage. I thought the rear suspension was particularly weak in design at the very back of the subframe, and that a lower rear strut bar would be worthwhile. The front already has two braces as standard.

All the best

Berni

The Radium King

strut brace not sway bar. strut braces stiffen the top of the struts - stop them from moving. in a high-g corner the wheels are trying to turn while the car is trying to go in a straight line. in extreme cases the inner front wheel will actually fly in the air and all the weight will be on the outside wheel (fwiw, sway bars can fix this by keeping the car level). so, wheel will try to move inwards relative to chassis. conversely, top of strut will try to move outwards. that's why strut braces are made of aluminum or carbon fiber - they're not designed for compression or shear but rather tension - no stretch. if the strut tops do move you will impact camber - it will go less negative which means less tire/asphalt contact patch when you need it most. and with the suspension design on the boxster this will also impact toe and caster. so, a proper strut bracing will triangulate the top of the strut to reduce movement in all directions. note that the boxster has the triangulating braces up front, but not the actual cross brace - it relies completely on the inner fender wells for this bracing.

on the rear of the boxster you have a lot of steel joining the two strut tops already. and, turning loads are a less on the rear than the front (turn-in usually occurs with braking and vehicle weight thrown forward). i mean put one in if you want, but i'm not sure it meets the benefit to $ ratio (many will argue that the front strut brace doesn't either; i think porsche stopped putting them on thier race cars, but their race cars are caged and seam welded so a lot more structurally stiff - and their race cars don't have 100k miles on them and getting struturally saggy).

berni29

Hello again!

Thank you for the explanation, but my bad, I was actually thinking of the rearmost legs of the rear subframe where the only thing that ties them together is the thin diamond shaped metal tray. Rennline do one that looks like it may be quite effective. https://www.rennline.com/Rear-Subfra...info/E35.SB96/

All the best

Berni

Quadcammer

Harness without Hans, regardless of airbags is a no-go.

For a streetable track car:

1. PFC 08 pads with sebro slotted rotors/ GT3 ducts
2. 997S oil cooler/heat exchanger
3. Clean the junk out of your front rads
4. Convert the top to manual use. Saves weight and is easier
5. Ditch the stock heavy battery. I use a 14lb ATVish battery
6. Feal coilovers are great for the money.
7. Shifter mods to your taste
8. I like NT01s. I currently run 235/255, but the car pushes a bit. I'm going to step up to 255/275 for next season.
9. Oil deep sump did very little to prevent my pressure drops, but the car hasn't blown up either, so who knows. 2qt is fine as its in the line of the tires, so unless you straddle something high, its a non issue
10. the stock AOS design is a pos. some cars, like mine, have issues and like to smoke, others don't. I guess try a new Porsche branded stocker and see how it goes.

zedcat

A nagging issue with my 04S was overheating the power steering fluid/pump. Never got round to addressing it and then sold car. If I had kept it I would have added a cooler probably. I had the 996 GT3 buckets on B-K mounts and needed the roll bar extension to pass the broomstick test. I had both 3 pt belt and Schroth 6 points. Got a bolt in harness bar from Stable Energies to get the shoulder belt geometry right. The GT3 console delete gave me a bit more leg room. I ran Pagid yellow f/ black r pads. Probably would change to PFC now though. I had ROW M030 springs/shocks and GT3 LCAs which was good for a dual use car. It was a fun car but seemed to always need something fixed between events.