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Coming Next Issue
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Beat Gas Prices |
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BBQ Guide |
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Dells Auto Museum |
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iPod FM Tuners |
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2004 Porsche GT3 Review
Beauty and the Beast: An Owner's Perspective (continued) |
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After the first 1,000 miles were gently done, I went to a Porsche Owner’s Club event at Streets of Willow to learn about the car and its track manners. It is a completely different car to drive at the track than the M3, as the Porsche doesn’t feel nearly as well balanced or planted. I'd learn that the secret to making it go fast lies in learning a whole new way of driving. The P-car really demands that you get to know it, understand it and most of all, respect it. You can’t get away with some of the gentle throttle steering inputs like you can in other cars, as it showed me by "coming around" on me at over 100mph in turn one. As I went flying up the hill tail first, both feet in, I realized that all I thought I knew about race driving was useless. This was a new relationship, and the old ways just wouldn’t do with this car. Imagine transitioning from training domesticated show-poodles to wild wolves and you'll get some idea of how much harder the GT3 is to handle at high speeds than an M3.
The following weekend I did two track days at big Willow, the self-proclaimed "Fastest Road in the West." I was lucky to find another GT3 owner there, so I took some time to compare notes with him. He had swapped out the OEM Michelins for Yokohama AVS, and was able to turn pretty fast laps, but I was still struggling to find my feet in the car, and last weekend's spin was still firmly implanted in my memory. With the GT3, I was well off my old pace in the M3, and the car felt like it was about to "go away from me" everywhere on the track. I was pretty unimpressed, and mentioned this on the Roadfly Porsche message board. That is when I was sent a very helpful note from a racer who explained to me that the problem with my car was almost certainly in the suspension and alignment. The GT3 cars are hyper sensitive to set up, he said, and they must be dialed-in properly to feel right, otherwise they are really off, and quite a handful. He sent me a set of specs that he had from the Porsche factory - the ones they use to hustle GT3 cars around the Nurbergring. What did we do before the Internet?!
I took the car to a Porsche racing house in Los Angeles, and had everything dialed-in as per the spec sheet. This process included corner weighing and balancing the car with driver's weight in it, and then re-aligning everything around that. The guy doing the work said that he could see that the car was definitely fighting me by the tire wear patterns.
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