carrering

padded and leather covered roll bar. now that would be some bling :-)

Alan Smithee

A guy I know did that to a highly modified 993 Turbo track/street car...gotta say, it was pretty sweet...

jon b

Sorry guys but unlike my 996GT3RS the 997 variant does not include a carbon hood - it is aluminium

I will post the full EVO road test tomorrow

pcar964

Including the driver, considering they're including electronic nannies

mitch236

I don't think you can call TC a "nanny". It's used in F1. ABS too. There's nothing like PSM in the 997 so I don't see it as a negative.

LastGT3

You wanna bet that TC is not a nanny?!!!
In July a saw an instructor drive a 996GT3 into a wall by puttinng WAYYY too much throttle down to quickly on the apex and spun her and punted it into concrete - TC would have have saved him.
Oh - it wasnt his car - he drives a cayman - power is everything.

pcar964

Give me a break man! Traction control is absolutely a nanny. And who ever said F1 was nanny-free? Put today's F1 drivers in a Formula 1 car from the 70s/80s and see how many of them spend more time mowing grass than hitting apexes... welcome to the age of less driver involvement, ushered in by people who see it as "progress."

stuka

What's worse is we now have a generation of drivers who progress to fast groups with PSM never off. Hint, if your rear pads wear faster than the front, it aint you that's fast, it's PSM busy making you look good and saving your bacon while you are luckily within the save-able parameters of PSM.

So what happens when they get in trouble in fast group speed and PSM has done all it could?

Spectacular crashes, is what happens. I have seen it at Laguna, Sears, PIR, you name it.

Hell, some organizations even tell their fast group students to leave PSM/DSC/ASC on.

Why? Make them f'ing take some car control classes before putting them in the fast group.

Electronic nannies only make crashes all the more spectacular when they happen.

mitch236

The point is that TC can be completely disabled unlike PSM. As far as ABS, I like it. It saves alot of tires for me.

Flame away....

Flying Finn

I completely agree.

I had a student who was I was instucting in Homestead, he had nice almost stock 993 and was doing pretty good.
He was talking about getting a GT3, I told him he should wait and get better before doing that, he said he didn't want to see them (GT3s) to pass him at track.
I told him there's only one or two GT3s that pass me, others don't so he could also do that by getting better.

Saw him few months after that, heard he had GT3 and asked has he been at track etc. He replied yes and that he totaled his GT3 (back started to slide, over correction, "face" first to the wall... And on top of that, he blamed the tyres for the crash since they were not r-compounds and had no enough grip...

I love 997 GT3 & GT3RS but all this crap (PSM/DSC/ASC) really bothers me. TC is ok since as Mitch said it can be turned off but all that other crap can not and that is the big no, no to me.

pcar964

Exactly. When a yellow group driver was asking me why his car felt like it was "skidding out" on turn 17 at Sebring, It became frighteningly clear to me that the level of driver skill even in the fast solo groups is not necessarily what you expect. This guy had only a superficial understanding of car dynamics, and it seemed as if he was trying to "think" his way around the track instead of "feel" it. If you're trying to make logical deductions about what a car is doing underneath you, you DON'T have good car control. It should be second nature, automatic. Furthermore, what Finn said is right on - people like that are very quick to blame the car for a supposed "problem," when in actual fact they are either over-driving the car, or just plain suck, etc.

Nannies like PSM only make the fast run groups more accessible to poor drivers like that guy, and it makes the hobby that much more dangerous for the rest of us.

eclou

Ban the cars! Do it for the children!

Seriously, I have always wondered how much better HPDE drivers would become if all forced to lap courses in bare bones miatas for the first half dozen weekends.

pcar964

That, or shifter karts.

mooty

TC PAM whatever is probably due to liability, my guess.
they do give you a sense of false saftey and really should be avoided by beginners who are looking to get seroius to tracking.

if you do a handful of days each year. you probably want to have psm. you really will not get that good and you are out there to learn and have some fun. scaring yourself is NOT fun. that said. i dont mean to turn on psm and drive as if you are schumie.

if you want to be more serious, then in addition to ditching psm tc and all, get below 200 hp. big hp cars are hard to handle, everything being same (seems obvious isn't it)... and big hp cars go fast on straight so you cheat, fast in line slow in turns. we natrally compare our speed to other cars on track with you. in my cayman, i have to stump my feet and shake my butt to get the car moving on straights, so i really dont like to brake for turns and lose speed. in GT3, most other cars are slower so i pass them and then you one of the faster cars on track with nothign to pass (until you lap them), for me, i lose my incentive to driver harder and to catch up. then i get even lazier and cheat at corners too. slows down my learning process.

the few times i truly enjoyed my GT3 on track was when other faster GT3's are out, cosmos, caleb and so forth when i have to push the GT3 to have fun with them.

and when you start pushing it hard, it's much easier to push a 200hp car and learn the dynamics than it is to push a 400hp and tring to hang on to your dear life when you are still in your first 5 years of tracking.

i know it's easier said than done. heck often times i want to drop a 3.8L in my car. but then i realize i would be defeating the purpose of moving to a slower car in the first place.

frayed

mooty, I found the same thing. When I had my GT3 on track, I only was scratching the surface of its potential and was faster than anything out there including another GT3. There are some modded vettes though that rock, but weren't out those weekends I was. It takes the fun out of it if you are lapping people.

Running a Cayman, S2000, M3, etc seems to me to be a sweet spot at most track events. You can go fast as hell, and properly driven be faster than most cars but the big hp cars that have a good driver and/or slicks. But they certainly don't put you in baller status at the track. heh.