Nizer

Cup running costs vary depending on a number of factors:

- are you club racer or pro racer
- are you fighting at pointy end of the stick or happy to be mid pack
- are easy or hard on equipment
- do you adhere rigidly to maintenance intervals or push them

Figure $3k/hr run time for "normal" maintenance, mid-level support, and transport and you're getting close.

Any comparison of Cup vs street running costs has to be done on like-for-like basis or it's irrelevant, i.e, both cars on slicks, both same %throttle, etc.

TRAKCAR

I think it's hard to make a CUP work without slicks, biggest difference.
Not being able to move it without trailer main inconvenience.

If used as a DE car it will wear roughly the same as a street car in DE if driven similarly.
Once you race, well how fast you want to go? How much you want to spend right?
CUP or anything else.

TrackFan

Lets not mixup racing with track days. Not many will buy a new RS, and race it, but doing track days with it makes sense.

If you had the money to buy a Cup car for just track days. The expense would be much less than racing it. I'm sure it would still be higher than an RS, but that's the price you pay to track a real race car. Racing it will of course be very expensive.

Lets face it. Putting any Porsche on the track for racing, or track days won't be cheap. Don't do it to impress anybody. Do it for yourself, because you love it. That's the only way to justify the expense.

hf1

I use my GT3 for joy-rides and DE/practice -- only racing arrive&drive/rentals over the last five years. I got the GT3 in a package with a Trailex trailer but have only towed it twice in 1.5 years. Prefer to just drive it to/from the track. Much less hassle.

The arrive&drive/rental racing market is pretty tight -- don't think anyone is becoming too rich in that business. Skip Barber is barely profitable (if at all). In each instance, I estimate tops 10% profit margin over the total costs I would incur if I owned and raced the equivalent car. If a Cup rental is $12k for a club race weekend, then it would probably cost you $11k (all in) to race your own Cup in the same event and at the same level of competitiveness.

In return:
- you save precious time (how much is an hour of your time worth?) towing it to/from shops for maintenance, or arranging transport and logistics for faraway tracks.
- you get to pick and choose the cars and events/series you wish to race (fly & race).

The more stuff I own, the more I realize that ownership is over-rated.

CAlexio

True on so many fronts.. I need to look into these arrive/drive events, makes so much sense from a time perspective

TrackFan

Plus, you have the expense of buying the Cup car to start off, and that can be lost in a bad wreck.

hf1

Liability (or insurance) is the same whether you wreck your own Cup or someone else's. No difference on that front.

EDIT: Correction. You do get some economies of scale advantages with insurance (liability) when offered through a bigger shop/organization (Skip Barber) vs. getting it on your own for your own race car. Also, insurance companies could offer lower rates when they have some assurance that the car has been maintained properly (less likely to get wrecked) by an outfit with whom they have a long history/statistics of previous business.

Nizer

Edit: Only one guy I know that runs street GT3 same way as Cup and trust me he isn't spending any less than I am.

GTEE3

^
a Cup will always be more expensive due to Race gas differential and the additional transport expense...trailer and truck/SUV.
Then, there is the Cup engine/seq. trans rebuild expense...ouch!

SamFromTX

Amen, brother!

Spyerx

Current porsche DFI implementation does have a carbon maintenance issue. Discussed this with my shop engine builder and they are seeing carbon on their turbo customer engines. Not as bad as Audi or Mini however, but it does require engine drop to address (pull intake manifold). One of their turbo customers with about 30k on his 997.2 engine was getting retarded ignition and having power issues. Carbon build up was the issue. That said, he has not seen a lot of this mostly due to lower mileage on most of their customer cars he thinks.

Also asked him about mezger/new engine platform. He loves the split case mezger design, well known, knows every nuance and exactly what to expect and how to extract the most performance. He's built who knows, how many, from 1000+ hp turbos applications to big HP high compression race engines to street builds.

He does have quite a bit of experience with the new engine platform used on the 997.2 and 991 mostly in the turbo applications, which is the platform basis for the new GT3 engine, and had lots of good things to say about it from a design and internals perspective (and NOTHING good to say about the engine used in the 997.1 / 996 non gt/turbo cars). They have quite a few turbo cars making huge power on this platform, and reliability has been very good.

Based his opinions of the design and on his relationships at motorsport he expects it to be used in the race cars soon enough.

mooty

I'm with Nizer, I have tracked many many gt3 variants.
amd two cups
if u use them similarly the street car is maybe $500 less per hour less than cup, which in big pic is irrelevant

each has their own issues. to say one is better than the other is simply wrong. analogy would be would u like a 8' long pole or a 24" diameter pole up the rear? they all do similar damage I would imagine.

lmk once you guys try it, then can complete my thesis.

mooty

despite the recent anger post on u being troll. I think above post shows u know what u talking about. now become a member and bitch with the rest of us who have too much time on their hands

tcsracing1

In the same enviroment (race class) the street car will be on same tires, fuel and logistics as cup.
However the transmission in the Cup does cost more per rebuild then a 996 Cup tranny in a street car converted to race....

The Cup does tip the scales in operating but gets it back in seconds on the track.

tcsracing1

Well, that is not entirely true...

The Mezger when timed out can be torn down and rebuilt over and over again.
The DFI when timed out is replaced not rebuilt.

The replacement cost of the Mezger is high whereas the DFI replacement cost is resonable.

The DFI has shown to be quite dependable. However it is still too soon to know for sure which is partly why some gear heads are looking for 2007-2009 turbos instead of the the 2010-2013 turbos...