earlyapex

Congratulations! 1. For DE and other high performance driving schools, you don't need a roll cage. A roll bar adds a bit of safety so if you don't need the back seats I would go the rout of a good roll bar. DAS has a very good reputation and I would chose they're products over the Tequipment roll bar. I've seen a nice roll bar by TC Design in Milpitas. They have an excellent reputation and they can get you a custom roll bar with installation for the same price as the DAS roll bar without installation. 2. Use the lightest wheel/tire package for autocrosses. Use the nicest looking for daily use. The stock Rosso's are predictable on the track, but wear out quickly. Their ride also quickly deteriorates with track use and milage. I've got 6,500 miles on my Ross's and I have approximately 1/8" before I hit the wear indicators. I would stay away from R-compounds until you get very comfortable with the 996. I'd perform a search on several Porsch BBS's to get a feel for what people are running. I think I will try the BFG KD's (nice balance of performance and milage) after my Rosso's have given up their last tread. 3. Buttonwillow is a fun and challenging track. Your Porsche should do well without any special preparation. Do the normal track inspection. 4. You may want to research the BK oil starvation kit. There is a nice discussion of this kit and the 3.4L engine on Rennlist.. Apparently, a few 3.4L engined cars have experienced oil starvation on the track during sustained high g-loading with racing slicks. I don't think you'll get close to that during DE's, but I don't know how far you're going to take it. 5. I'll be at Laguna Seca this weekend with the Monterey and Santa Cruz PCA Chapters. You should come by.

You should be fine as long as you're taking this road at an appropriate speed.

Ouch! Not compatible with 04 Porsche's. When will car manufacturers join the rest of the audio world?

A sucker is born everyday. Kiss your deposit goodbye if you take the bait.

These products have a limit to the size of hole they will plug up and speed and distance that you can drive after the repair. I would not drive around for a few days with a "sealed" tire. I had an e46 M3 like your friend and I suffered a rear wheel puncture that was too large for the sealant to plug up and thus had the car flat bedded to the dealership. It took weeks for a replacement tire to be located as they wear backordered from the manufacturer. The M3 is now history and I'm happily driving the car of my dreams. Try to free up your trunk and get your spare tire back in there.

That's the rumor. Some folks have experienced this while others have not. You look pretty serious about racing your 996 so I would go with a company that races their cars and thus can give you first hand experience.

I'd recommend that you ask this section on the tech section of the PCA web site. the moderators have allot of racing experience and they should give you good advice.

This is the Tire Rack write-up on the S03. It doesn't have a N number. Potenza S03

Nothing works in zero traction situations! Your tires must be in contact with the road surface to affect the direction of your travel, accelerate or decelerate your car. A hydroplaning car is the perfect example. AWD vehicles get the engines power to the ground via 4 tires and often come with sophisticated systems that modulate the power between the different wheels. My wife's Audi has the wonderful Quattro system and it was much better in the snows of Colorado than our Jeep Grand Cherokee with Quadra Drive. AWD doesn't help you brake. That's what ABS and stability systems are for. From the Porsche web site: "Extra Driving Safety All-Round The new 911 Carrera 4 is the first-ever Porsche to feature Porsche Stability Management (PSM), a combination of four-wheel drive designed consistently for sports motoring and electronic suspension control carefully geared to the character of the car. The result is not only a high standard of driving safety, but also that very special driving pleasure Porsche drivers have learnt to appreciate so much over the last 50 years. This objective calls for control and suspension management features different from those to be found in other cars incorporating similar systems. For PSM is conceived and designed for a routined, committed style of motoring. A Porsche will retain its agile, sporting and dynamic driving behaviour all the way to the most extreme limit. And thanks to the high standard of safety reserves offered by the suspension, the driver only has to intervene in the car's behaviour on dry roads when driving under near-racing conditions. At the same time PSM discreetly and almost unnoticeably corrects any minor deviations in directional stability attributable to load change or application of the brakes in a bend. Stopping Distances Even Shorter Than Before Porsche's engineers allow PSM to intervene more energetically at an even earlier point on wet or slippery roads and, in particular, on road surfaces with varying frictional coefficients. And it is here, too, that PSM makes stopping distances much shorter while keeping the car stable and firmly on course when applying the brakes. In its operation PSM follows two fundamental control strategies: First, it offers the well-known concept of longitudinal control with ABS anti-lock brakes, anti-spin control and the Automatic Brake Differential keeping the car smoothly on course when accelerating and applying the brakes on a straight or in bends. Second, PSM also offers lateral or transverse control keeping the car reliably on course even when subject to substantial lateral forces in a bend. The corrections required for this purpose are provided by the specific, carefully controlled application of the brakes. Any tendency to oversteer with the rear end of the car swerving round is counteracted by the exact, perfectly metered application of the brake on the outer front wheel in a bend. Understeering, in turn, is prevented by applying the brake on the rear inner wheel. Lengthwise dynamic control also comes in here to provide a supportive effect, E-Gas technology in the Carrera 4 serving to adjust the position of the throttle butterfly according to specific requirements. On the road, this means much easier and smoother steering. To ensure precise function at all times, PSM features a whole number of monitoring units. The wheel speed sensors introduced for the first time together with ABS not only provide information on the speed of the car, acceleration and deceleration, but are also able, by considering the difference in speed from left to right, to "detect" bends and their radius. Further units are the steering angle sensor, a lateral acceleration sensor and a yaw sensor serving to detect any drift inclination of the car. PSM: Faster Than Even a Routined Driver All data determined by the sensors are stored within the PSM computer, evaluated within fractions of a second and passed on as instructions to the E-Gas or brake system. As a result, PSM responds a lot faster in threatening situations than even the most routined driver. Really enthusiastic drivers wishing to try out the "natural" dynamic behaviour of their Carrera 4 on the race track are able to temporarily deactivate the lateral dynamic control provided by Porsche Stability Management simply by flipping a switch on the instrument panel. And even then the risk involved when taking the car into a power slide is reasonably limited, since all the driver has to do when the angle of the car becomes excessive is to step on the brakes in order to reactivate the dynamic control function. So under circumstances like this PSM is able to slightly "bend", but of course never fully override, the laws of physics." This is a nice video link. Champion Motorsports video Hope this helps.

I take all sources of information with a certain grain of salt. I see no reason that "The Stranger's" views are any more accurate than I've read elsewhere. The current 3.6L engine in the 996 is pretty much max'ed out so I wouldn't be surprised to see Porsche increase its displacement to 3.8L.

Glad you stayed on the right path! I am very happy with the switch from the M3 to my current 996. It rides looks and rides better according to my wife. She hated the M3's seats as they gave her a back ache after an hour. I sometimes wonder if I bought too much car. This lasts only until I fire up the motor and then I realize that I bought the right car. I can't keep the smile from my face.

That is a loaded question! The choice between a 17" and 18" tire depends on personal taste and what you want your tire/wheel package to do. Larger wheels look better up to a point. I think the 996 looks good with 17" wheels, great with 18" wheels, and ungainly with 19" wheels. Your ride will deteriorate as you go up in wheel size because your tire side wall has to correspondingly decrease in order to keep the overall diameter of the tire/wheel the same. Less side wall equals harsher ride. Given the same tire, a 18" wheel will maintain a larger contact patch during hard cornering because there is less tire deflection. This can be offset with stiffer side walls, but this will degrade ride quality. Tire noise has more to do with tire construction, tread design, and rubber compound than wheel size. Every change in the tire/wheel combination has its advantages and trade offs. I live in the central coast of CA and our weather in never that bad. An 18" wheel/tire package works well over here. I would do it differently if I lived in an area that regularly experienced cold weather, snow, or had very bad roads. Under these conditions, I would run 17" wheels and narrower tires (all season or snows) during the fall/winter months. I would get a better ride and be much safer. Race conditions require an all together different line of thinking. You are usually limited on your tire/wheel choices by the rules that you run under. Again, bigger wheels are not always better. Autocross competitors regularly run small wheels to minimize weight and thus maximize acceleration out of slow corners. Additionally, larger wheels weigh more unless you shell out the bucks for forged construction. It's also harder to find competition tires to fit 18" wheels. It all depends on the rules and what you want to accomplish. The 996 has a firm ride and little can be done to the suspension to make it smoother without significantly changing its sporting characteristics. The best way to make a 996 more comfortable is to change to 17" wheels. There are several all season tires in this size that should give you a better ride than the high performance summer tires that are common in the 18" fitment.

Don't make the mistake! I just traded in a 2003 e46 M3 with the standard 18" wheels for a 40th Anniversary 911. My Porsche has 18" wheels as standard equipment and the ride in not much different from the M3. They are both harsh on broken pavement, over expansion joints, road nipples, etc. The M3 with 19" wheels rides more harshly than with 18" wheels. You need to drive the two cars on the same road back to back to make a valid comparison. Everyones' taste is different and we are all looking for a different blend of handling and ride comfort, but you are mistaken to think that a M3 with have a comfortable ride on poor road surfaces. Furthermore, I'm not surprised that your car rides poorly during the winter. The side walls of your tires will be very stiff due to the cooler temperatures and result in a much harsher ride. They may never warm up to the same extent as they do during the summer months. I wouldn't expect a coil over suspension kit to make much of a difference. Your best bet is to switch to 17" wheels during the winter. My Porsche has all of the attributes that I wanted in a sports car that was missing my previous M3. I wouldn't make the switch if I were you. You could always get a truly comfortable car (something like a Subaru or even a Lexus RX 330) for the winter and garage your Porsche.

That's total BS. The service department is there to make money for the dealership and to give you good service. You should talk the service manager or even the owner of the dealership and give him/her your comments. My local dealership has a service rep dedicated to the Porsche vehicles and treats the owners as they should be treated. Lexus has set the standard for customer care. We deserve no less!

I also made the switch from an e46 M3 to a 996. The M3's brakes were touchy to say the least. I could stand the car on its nose with tip of my big toe. This made heel-toe shifting impossible for me. I also could not find a good seating position where I felt comfortable with the brake and accelerator pedals. The Porsche's brakes take much more pedal pressure, but are easier to modulate and I am able to heal-toe shift without a problem. The e46 M3 braking system is well known to fade under repeated braking from high speeds (i.e. track use). This is easily remedied with appropriate pad and fluid changes. It also came over with solid rotors while its European counterpart had floating, drilled rotors. BMW thought that Americans would not like the noise associated with drilled, floating rotors. They also thought we shouldn't have functioning brake ducts and blocked the ducts on our cars with some plastic plates. These plates fortunately popped off easily.

Gry, Car purchases are all about matching your wants, needs, and expectations. You obviously didn't need a C4 Cab so that's out of the equation. You wanted a Porsche that felt faster and as nimble as your Boxster S. You bought a car that you expected to fill those wants, but unfortunately the C4 Cab was never intended to be a Boxster with a bigger engine. The numbers show that it gets up to speed more quickly. It obviously doesn't handle the way you expected it to do. Porsche probably didn't intend the C4 Cab to compete with the Boxster in the twisties. You would have realized this had you had a chance to adequately test drive the car before your purchase. I had this eye opening experience when I test drove a 996 TT. I expected a nimble and fast car, but it felt heavy and fast. Needless-to-say, it stayed on the dealer lot. Your C4 Cab is obviously a very good car so your left with either getting rid of it or modifying it to feel better. I'd start with the following: 1. Four wheel alignment. Is your car sluggish because its alignment is out of spec? 2. The M030 or ROW M030 suspension package. You should realize that a heavier, rear engined, all wheel drive car will never feel like a light, mid engined, rear wheel drive car. It's all about managing your expectations. You could spend allot of money on your C4 Cab. I'd spend it wisely and otherwise a very nice car that most of us would die for.

Depends on how much time you spend looking at your pedals. I wouldn't purchase anything I haven't seen or touched.

Ouch, I thought that "sports" suspension meant the M030 option! I don't quite understand why Porsche chose to change the rear suspension, leaving the front suspension alone. Nonetheless, I love the way my 40th Anniversary 911 handles versus my previous 2003 M3. I would love to know where I can get more detailed information on this model.