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A cracked or blown out strut tower is more common than you think. Usually happens in the people who track their cars but routine road potholes can take a car down as one did to my previous GT4. Our local top of the line certified Porsche body shop has done about 15-20 over the last 10 years. Both Cayman and 911s, with both street and track cars, and a few race cars. It is about $7k to fix it right, and was covered by the insurance as mine happen on the street. Porsche considers the strut tower casting a wear item. When they break, you just fix them and move on.
These are light weight aluminum castings bonded to the steel chassis. With a big hit, do you want to replace a breakable part or bend the chassis. This can only be done by a special certified Porsche repair shop with the proper training, tools, and multifunctional car jig. To repair it they remove the wheel, fender, suspension pieces, etc and drill out all of the rivets holding the cast piece to the front steel tub. They then basically use a putty knife kind of tool to separate the sheet metal from the casting and remove the entire busted piece. The new part has to be painted and then both surfaces have to be sanded and prepped for the the bonding process. The car is then precisely attached to jig by the jack points. The jig comes with an erector set type of arms and extensions that are unique to each model of car that the jig was designed to repair. With these jig parts they build a mount for the strut tower casting in 3D spaced. The new cast piece is then bonded to the steel tub in the same way it is done at the factory, which is the same way airplanes are made. The bonding is done by proprietary Porsche rivets at $30 a pop, special Porsche glue $100, and of course a special Proprietary Porsche rivet gun that applies the exact amount of torque to get an even film of glue in the joint. Not too tight or too loose, but just right. In this way the repair will be good for the life of the car as it is done exactly as Porsche wants. It sets for a day or so and then is all put back together and touch up painted.
The dealership nor just any body shop can order any of these parts. It can only come from the authorized Porsche repair shop through its chosen dealership. Porsche expects all of this to be done to within a tolerance of just 3 mm and when mine returned to the dealership for its alignment after the repair, the difference in ride height was only 1mm off from before to after. Pretty amazing work. Our body shop here in Dallas is the best in the city and has done 15-20 of these over the last 10 years. It is routine stuff for them. Felix brought his car up here from Austin to get it fixed because of Stuart's reputation and vast amount of experience completing this type of repair. We both had outstanding results and our cars are literally as good as new. It seems like horrible damage to your car, but in the right hands, it's not really a big deal. Far less complicated than pulling a motor on a 2024 GT3 to replace a defective oil pan seal. Never had another with it with for the following two years.
This is what killed my shock tower. Hit it at 6:30 am on the way to the track in the dark on the freeway off ramp. Never saw it, but I sure heard a loud kaboom, and knew immediately what had happened. It was caused by trucks braking too hard and compressing the asphalt into a divot followed by a ski ramp. Fortunately after consulting with a friend in the know, I was able to slowly drive it home and later to Stuart's for the repair.
Ouch
Can everyone see this crack. Yes, Felix's car did have a hairline type crack, but it was absolutely there. Almost nobody would have noticed this, but he is extremely meticulous about maintaining a number of these GT cars for his group. A little more driving and it would have looked like mine below. I of course look at mine most times before I go to the track as well.
Last edited by lovetoturn; 04-01-2024 at 11:42 PM.
I wish the plate was thicker and took advantage of the threaded boss sitting right there but it is better than nothing. Some slight trimming of frunk plastic trim, washer bottle fill assembly, and cabin filter airbox required but it sounds worse than it is.
What somebody should do is make a simple steel cup, that is inserted underneath the strut tower.
that would take the impact off of the cast aluminum tower,
these reinforcements on the top of the tower, really won’t mitigate the shock to the tower.
another problem is because of the lowered ride height there is no external bump stop.
just an internal one, supposedly..
basically a recipe for disaster.
What somebody should do is make a simple steel cup, that is inserted underneath the strut tower.
that would take the impact off of the cast aluminum tower,
I don't disagree. Strange that Porsche Motorsport came up with these reinforcement plates for the front of the Clubsport cars but the factory installed a bonded + riveted reinforcement underneath the rear GT4 (and I assume GT4RS) towers:
The best plan to prevent this seems to be reinforcements top and bottom, a "reasonable" ride height, sufficient bump stops in good working order, dampers with high speed blow off in at least compression, and not hitting rumble strips/curbs/potholes. It still sucks to have shock towers as a fusible link though.
In fact, that raises a question - what dampers were installed on all the affected cars? I wonder if any were equipped with high speed blow off. Just a thought.
A cracked or blown out strut tower is more common than you think. Usually happens in the people who track their cars but routine road potholes can take a car down as one did to my previous GT4. Our local top of the line certified Porsche body shop has done about 15-20 over the last 10 years. Both Cayman and 911s, with both street and track cars, and a few race cars. It is about $7k to fix it right, and was covered by the insurance as mine happen on the street. Porsche considers the strut tower casting a wear item. When they break, you just fix them and move on.
These are light weight aluminum castings bonded to the steel chassis. With a big hit, do you want to replace a breakable part or bend the chassis. This can only be done by a special certified Porsche repair shop with the proper training, tools, and multifunctional car jig. To repair it they remove the wheel, fender, suspension pieces, etc and drill out all of the rivets holding the cast piece to the front steel tub. They then basically use a putty knife kind of tool to separate the sheet metal from the casting and remove the entire busted piece. The new part has to be painted and then both surfaces have to be sanded and prepped for the the bonding process. The car is then precisely attached to jig by the jack points. The jig comes with an erector set type of arms and extensions that are unique to each model of car that the jig was designed to repair. With these jig parts they build a mount for the strut tower casting in 3D spaced. The new cast piece is then bonded to the steel tub in the same way it is done at the factory, which is the same way airplanes are made. The bonding is done by proprietary Porsche rivets at $30 a pop, special Porsche glue $100, and of course a special Proprietary Porsche rivet gun that applies the exact amount of torque to get an even film of glue in the joint. Not too tight or too loose, but just right. In this way the repair will be good for the life of the car as it is done exactly as Porsche wants. It sets for a day or so and then is all put back together and touch up painted.
The dealership nor just any body shop can order any of these parts. It can only come from the authorized Porsche repair shop through its chosen dealership. Porsche expects all of this to be done to within a tolerance of just 3 mm and when mine returned to the dealership for its alignment after the repair, the difference in ride height was only 1mm off from before to after. Pretty amazing work. Our body shop here in Dallas is the best in the city and has done 15-20 of these over the last 10 years. It is routine stuff for them. Felix brought his car up here from Austin to get it fixed because of Stuart's reputation and vast amount of experience completing this type of repair. We both had outstanding results and our cars are literally as good as new. It seems like horrible damage to your car, but in the right hands, it's not really a big deal. Far less complicated than pulling a motor on a 2024 GT3 to replace a defective oil pan seal. Never had another with it with for the following two years.
This is what killed my shock tower. Hit it at 6:30 am on the way to the track in the dark on the freeway off ramp. Never saw it, but I sure heard a loud kaboom, and knew immediately what had happened. It was caused by trucks braking too hard and compressing the asphalt into a divot followed by a ski ramp. Fortunately after consulting with a friend in the know, I was able to slowly drive it home and later to Stuart's for the repair.
Ouch
Can everyone see this crack. Yes, Felix's car did have a hairline type crack, but it was absolutely there. Almost nobody would have noticed this, but he is extremely meticulous about maintaining a number of these GT cars for his group. A little more driving and it would have looked like mine below. I of course look at mine most times before I go to the track as well.
Good point on this. When it comes to suspension you have to have a weak link in there somewhere that will fail before other pieces. Usually that is the least expensive piece to replace, unless it is a safety issue.
I used to go thru this on snowmobiles when riding up in thew mountains early in the season. Better to bend a trailing arm then cause structural damage when you take out a rock that's just hidden under some fresh powder.
In the case of the automobiles, if you bend the frame, that's pretty much a write-off by the insurance company.
04-01-2024, 07:58 PM
