I had a chance to drive a friend of mines 981 GT4 with the notion that I could purchase it and replace my 996. Upon test-driving this sample, the price difference to my 996.2 C2 was so drastic that I decided to focus on improving my car in areas where I thought it had the main differences. My start situation was an approx. 130k km / 80k miles driven chassis and a fairly fresh M96 engine as the previous owner had replaced the short block due to bore scoring. For this combo I had already swapped 1-way adjustable YCW coilovers with Swift springs, Michelin PS4S, Numeric shifter assembly and Ferodo DS2500 pads.




For me, the biggest and most impactful differences from the 981 GT4 that I could think of transferring over were: steering wheel, gear change, seat and sound.

I do also drive on the track, and am a track driving instructor for the local Porsche Club of Finland, but that is such a limited amount of the total experience that I have with the vehicle that I decided to not to focus on areas that have less overall impact on my enjoyment. I am eyeing on oiling solutions for M96, but haven’t pullet a trigger on any of them as of today.

As OEM carbon buckets were astonishingly expensive, I started by trying to find OEM 981/991 sports seats, which I scored from Germany from a 991 GTS that were barely used as they were removed from a vehicle destined for more track use. I had to make a wiring harness adapter for the seats, but the bolt locations to secure the seat to the chassis were same. For over 20 year newer seats I was happily surprised that my research had been correct. My previous seats were 2-way power adjustable and the new ones 4-way. This meant that I basically only needed to run power to the seats and there were no seat memory modules to take care of. So I fashioned a wiring adapter from a modified H7 lamp connector (991 seat harness) and some RC-car bullet connectors (996 car harness). After securing them with zipties and some hot glue, let’s see how they hold up.





Next up was a 991 steering wheel that fit the car, this requires a milled and integrated adapter in order to get the 996 splines to work with the 991 wheel. I found, from instagram of all places, a person/entity who was able to do this. Unfortunately the transaction didn’t fully go as planned, but in the end I had 95% the product that I ordered and was able to DIY the rest of it and fit it to the car, including the airbag. As I’m not 100% happy with the product and service, I will not name them here.



For gear change, I already had a Numeric shifter assembly, but I now added their shifter cables in order to make the shifts even crisper. I have a preference for a long gearstick, I like the interfaces (steering/gear lever) to be in close proximity and all my other toys already had this, so it definitely fit the 996 as well. I got a fitting adapter, extension and a **** from Raceseng which fit without any issues. I set the Numeric assembly to the lowest throw position which at the length of the lever turned out to be just perfect. I’m not 100% sold on the looks of the contraption, but at least it is modular so I can change things around. Perhaps adding a shift boot would help a bit here, but for now I like to keep the linkage naked.






For sound, well, I dropped in some cheap straight pipes. Most likely I’ll just mod my existing Dansk back boxes with the permanent sport exhaust mod, ie. Gundo Hack. Let’s see how terribly loud the straight pipes are once spring arrives and I can actually drive the car.



Additional “while I’m there” items going to be done at this point will be steel braided brake lines and Castro SRF, Rennline motor mounts (below), Powerflex transmission mount insert (below), new brake discs for every corner and updating the original 20+ year old paper speakers to composite 2-way Alpine S40’s (below). Let’s see if they make any difference while driving, but at least stationary the difference in sound quality is drastic.







All in all I'm super happy how this has turned out so far and am eagerly waiting spring to arrive and melt the snow away. The final look:

 

Very cool upgrades. Car looks fantastic.

 

Cool. All looks good. Like the shifter.

 

Looks amazing. Very jealous of the seats.

 

WOW, absolutely amazing interior.

 

The newer steering wheel looks great in the black interior! Someone posted a similar one in a light interior (Savanna Beige) a few weeks ago, and it looked really out of place imo… It blends much better with the black…

 

Thanks for the positive vibes!

I do think that the 991 seats with corresponding cloth/stitching color help the 991 wheel to sit in better. I had my doubts if I'd like the look or not, but it turned out better than expected even if I was primarily going for function first.

 

Nice

I've just upgraded the front dash and rear speakers using similar to the ones you installed

I went to 2-way Alpine S2-S40C (with separate tweeters)

This is my thread

Amazing Alcántara seats!!!!

 

The interior upgrades are awesome. Was is a pain switching the radio and climate control positions? I have a PCCM in my 996 as well and find the screen to be pretty useless because it's mounted so low.

 

I just noticed you have the PCCM (single DIN not +). How difficult wa sit to install? Did you have the infamous MOST system in your car?

 

Can't say that the screen would be much more usable in where it is now tbh, it is tiny. I use my phone for navigation anyways, there is a mag mount barely visible in front of the gearstick, which is one of the only places in the dash that has somewhat straight plastic. So 90s.

But, the PCCM install was carried some years ago by the previous owner, I got the car with it and therefore can't comment on installing it.

 

I agree with the screen visibility. I can’t think of a better setup than the hazard button trim mount. Clear sight of phone gps with eyes still on the road.

 

This looks fantastic, would be icing on the cake if you got all the stitching colors to match.

As far as the Numeric shifter goes, I wonder if the OEM rear center console could simply be chopped to achieve the right amount of "showing off" that Numeric shifter. I was asked to make a custom rear center console for someone that exposes most of the assembly and I do agree with him, letting all that anodized aluminum hang out is super cool.

 

That would be indeed rather cool, but the effort and cost to do that, at least for me, is not worth the benefit. And I've been thinking of doing something a bit more extreme to the center console for exactly those reasons. One of my other toys has a completely exposed shifter linkage and that is indeed quite pretty to look at. But for now, I'm quite happy with the self-upholstered trim piece that gives just a peek at the inner workings

 

First day of the spring that snow had decided to melt around the garage enough that I could be sure to be able to get her out and back in after a test drive.

All changes and upgrades done so far above are working flawlessly.

The straight pipes somehow are not obnoxiously loud, have no drone to speak of at cruise and the speaker upgrade can be heard/appreciated while driving. Considering the exhaust and road noise I was surprised that the difference was this large.
It's amazing what small things like good motor mounts and a lubed up gas pedal can do to driveline feel. Everything magically just got better.
The new steering wheel and seats are a massive improvement in haptics.
The long gearstick might get itself lowered to the middle setting for the next test drive, I got to experiment a bit.
And the gear cables might need a small adjustment to aim to improve 2 -> 3 shift. But that has always been a challenge in all of the 996's that I've driven. It might also be just my expectations of the gear lever trajectories, perhaps it is not possible to get a 2-3 shift to move exactly where I'd like it to go.

Other than that, I'm waiting for the weather to actually improve outside of these completely outlier warm and dry days and to be able to take this to the track.