While I have had the Lamborghini’s out on the track on occasion and once I had the Espada at the Virginia City hill climb, there is no doubt that maintenance and repair of those cars is quite high. So, I have been on the outlook for a dedicated race-car with low acquisition cost, good handling, power, upgradability and few cylinders. The Porsche 944 Turbo fit the bill very well, although the parts and service costs are quite high. I found a car in Phoenix, AZ on autotrader.com for a good price and after a brief phone conversation with the owner I flew there for a test drive and to inspect the 92kmile car. The car have had a minor bump in the front, invisible from 10 ft away, but the price was adjusted accordingly. The engine was strong, synchromesh and clutch worked as new, the was a new water pump and supposedly the belts were changed a year ago. The only question-marks, facing a 500-mile drive home through the desert, were low voltage and high temperature readings. I bought the car and to be safe I also bought a spare battery at Pep Boys, which I fortunately did not need and returned once back home, oddly enough at a small profit since the price is higher in Santa Barbara then in Phoenix. The low voltage is just a slight misreading of the instrument and the high temperature was caused by the use of a wrong bra covering up the intercooler intake. The car has the following option codes: 158, 383, 454, 593, 650 and 946, which can be decoded either here or here. The interesting parts are the driver sport seat (nice tight fit) and antilock brakes. An other interesting aspects is the fact that the boost gauge shows 2.0 bar, who knows what kind of chips it has. To my (and the previous owners) surprise the car also has LSD, but without gear-oilcooler. How that happened is undocumented, but I am glad it is there. The only things now needing service are one or two occasionally noisy CV joints, leaking steering rack, a small leak in exhaust and adding a high flow catalytic converter. I originally planed not to register the car, but it is just too much fun not to drive on the streets too.  

To establish a baseline for delivered power and torque I first bought a “Road Dyno” and later took the car on a chassis dyno at Germanson in Oxnard. The graphs can be seen below and as can be seen the curves are probably within 3% of each other throughout the RPM band, which is within the repeatability of the chassis dyno measurement. The Road Dyno is a little tricky to use, in that it only acquires good data 50% of the time and might require polarity inversion of the inductive pickup. Another difference between the two measurements was the speed through the RPM band, which was slower on the chassis dyno (done in 4th gear, ~20 sec). The Road Dyno measurement was done in 2nd gear, so if the O2 sensor was correcting for the fuel it might not have adequate time here. Other runs were made (some in 3rd gear) showing higher torque and lower power in agreement with the chassis dyno measurements. I weighed the car on a truck scale to be 3040lb (± 20 lb) with ˝ gas tank, spare wheel and unoccupied. On the internet I found the frontal area to be 1.89 m2. It is interesting to note that the boost pressure matches the torque curve, which as most other 944T’s drops off above 4000 RPM, making the power delivery flat between 4000 and 6000 RPM, again making gear shift points non-critical.

In November 2000 I had the car out on Willow Springs Raceway and did lap times around 1:48, reasonable for first time out, but certainly a number to improve on. The fastest that weekend was a Viper GTS at around 1:30. The weekend ended in an embarrassing low speed spin after turn 3, induced by a too heavy right foot, sudden boost and unfamiliarity with the limited slip differential (LSD).

Deliberately no pictures of the engine, it is standard to look at and there are plenty other pictures on the net.  Pictures will be shown when changes are implemented.