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I can see that line of thinking but it's not. In any given Cup race weekend, you have a medium chance of seeing a front "clip" being replaced at the track by doing that exact thing. Porsche Motorsport's trailers are there that sell the front clip for this specific purpose.
As for tower's/suspension mounting points failing. It is not uncommon in motorsports for street car chassis to fail (I had an E46 M3 I rolled at 110mph from the chassis failing, the suspension was still bolted to the ripped off chassis piece). However, for 718s on the street and track, I have not witnessed any widespread issue, aka your 718 street car doing laps will fail immediately in my limited experience (I am fly-in crew on Cups/clubsports as a fun side gig). To infer anything from a wrecked car without any details is just ridiculous. If you are legitimately concerned, call up TPC/BGB etc that run these almost every weekend. They would be the experts over any self-proclaimed experts on the forum.
Edit: FYI - It is something I would pay attention to on buying any used late model porsche car used in motorsports. Aluminum has a finite number of cycles it can take with these levels of stress. But your street car wont unless you crash/hit something that would be breaking other things anyway.
Last edited by Don Fitzpatrick; 09-29-2022 at 09:06 AM.
I think it's only as ghetto as the person doing the repair. When I get the chance I'll check the shop manual again but I'm pretty sure this was the official repair method barring any other frame damage that would necessitate putting the whole car on a jig.
Ya bonding and riveting while on a jig is the procedure for a lot of structural components for sure, so sounds legit but it being cast kinda throws a wrench in it so I wouldn't want to guess either.
My system also eliminated it as a changeable part too so I'm guessing if I went looking for step by step the procedures it wouldn't exist anymore. Now the strut tower says service with entire front end for my system, which means basically do this (its a 992 so slightly different but basically the same thing).
Last weekend while doing some hill country driving, I encountered some limitations of the GT4. I used up all of the travel in a place (not a hard hit, just a rapid dip, so no structural damage), and I didn't like the end of travel characteristics; the rear pogo'd pretty good. IMO, suspension is a bit soft for such short travel and I doubt it's position sensitive (like a lot of offroad suspensions is). In a couple other places, I got the splitter or diffuser blades to scrape, and I wasn't pushing at a really fast pace. WRT the scrapes, it is notable that the car's about 1/2" lower than OEM due to tires diameter, but that doesn't change the pogo. Before I openly complain much about it, I need to revisit with the suspension on 'stiff', didn't think to change it during the drive, just dialed things back to a very relaxed pace. Could also be that the road's irregularities have gotten larger over the past few years, it's due for a repave. That said, if 'stiff' mode doesn't move things very far in the right direction for this particular set of roads, I'll prob be heading a TRZ06 route. With this short of travel, if one wants a non-punishing ride it almost makes sense to have bypass shocks, but I've never seen that for the street.
The GT4 has pretty long front and rear overhang (chassis past the end of the wheel) so scraping is pretty easy to scrape if the road is irregular. The sport mode won't change the high speed dampening of the strut and I think you'll scrape just the same as you did in normal mode.
I swapped struts entirely, but kept the stock springs; no change in scraping on specific sections of road when the chassis heaves a lot. It doesn't pogo anymore, though I'm pretty sure if I really pressed the car I could still get it to bottom out.
Just throwing a thought out there based on a random pic that I found online of the strut tower. Would a brace that extends out and is also secured down at the two areas circled in blue provide better benefit overall? Seems like there's more material at those two bolt points.
I am honestly baffled they insist on cast aluminum in these areas. How much weight they save over steel? Probably hardly anything given they had to make the alu pieces relatively thicker.
seems that they may help to contain the damage but not prevent it.
That's pretty much the point of those strut tower brackets: they're there to prevent further damage (i.e. the strut tower blowing through the front hood), and help keep things intact in the moment such that the driver can safely bring the car to a stop. Others have suggested in the past that a steel cup on the underside of the strut tower might help reinforce this area (I gather BMWs have something similar?), but that doesn't seem like it would help any, either. Basically when it comes to this mode of failure: avoid big bumps at high speed, and if you can't then cross your fingers and hope you're lucky.
I'm analyzing the picture, though realizing the limitations with 2D. But It seems like the up forces (red arrows) may have bent the bracket, and the entire strut assembly was shifted outward (blue arrows) based on how the paint was scraped off around the bolt holes?
If the bracket is only secured down in two areas on the frame, I'd imagine that it would have to be extremely rigid to be effective in preventing any flexing from the upward forces from the strut.
09-29-2022, 08:59 AM
