Thanks for clarifying that! Dennis runs a great school.

I had a sweetly set up 06 cayman S street/track car. The prior owner spent a fortune on suspension and go fast parts and I tweaked it and installed seats and rollbar. For about a year, Mindy drove it to the track while I towed her ssm .

It was certainly WAY faster than the 993, but it never felt like a glove like my red car does. Truthfully I enjoyed it most on very long highway trips than either the racetrack or around town. I drove from Savannah to NY in a long day and (other than the ice storm in Delaware) the car destroyed I95

If it were the "only car" that I could have, it would have been a perfectly acceptable compromise. After having a dedicated racecar, I'm spoiled both by the security of a real safety system, and by suspension too uncompromising to drive elsewhere.

Of course now that i think about it, we drove the red car to the track also. It had plates and insurance but nothing made it street worthy. 700/900 lbs spring and no cats were...miserable. Mindy’s “punishment”for me trailering her miata to the glen was driving the red car 400 miles each way. Talk about an enduro!

Most race car parts are not DOT, approved. Get in an accident where someone gets hurt, and their lawyers will have a field day with a heavily modified track car.

I don’t know, I think it’s not quite that simple. Let me try to explain my opinion with messy circular logic and hand waving - it’s getting late lol. Hopefully it’s enough to make the point clear.

A car like a pre-built spec 944 with an open trailer is about as cheap as club racing in a typically-populated-in-most-regions class gets. If you already have an SUV or truck (yeah this can be a big hangup), running a Spec 944 and using an open trailer would likely be cheaper than running say a streetable Cayman or 996 race car even if the Cayman/996 ran on street tires.

I suppose you could counter argue that a non-spec 944 with just the required safety equipment and street tires would be cheaper still. So in essence, a cheap-to-buy-and-run car with a bare minimum race car conversion to keep build costs low (and it could certainly remain street legal if preferred) running on street tires with a long life - that is probably the cheapest way to go.

It wouldn’t be competitive in a class though, so advanced DE or TT might be nearly as fun as racing since you’d otherwise be running alone at the back anyways. That’s really a track car, not a race car, so then why not just skip the conversion altogether and save even more money.

The issue is, most of the appeal of W2W is getting to race competitively with others. Which is where the modest additional cost of Spec 944 would come back in and seem sensible - then you get competitors in the same class. And we’re back full circle.

A few folks around here do kind of go halfway and have a race car like a BMW 3 series that can carry a set of slicks in the cabin. They can then skip the trailer issue, load it up, drive it to the track on whatever old street rubber they have, and swap on the nice race tires at the track. *The key thing is there are a few of them, so they can race together. And I don’t know if they are actually street legal - I’m pretty confident they aren’t but am not 100% sure - but in Utah there are a few different ways to legally register older cars without mandatory emissions and safety inspections. (You could still get a ticket for noncompliance but you don’t have to get the car inspected.) The guys that do this seem to pretty much drive to and from events only, and it seems to work out pretty well for them. And all this said, there is much better local competition in the spec classes!

To add two more cents of input here...

With enough dollars, I think a Ruf-style integrated roll cage could be fabricated that would both (a) meet crash standards for an amateur-level race series and (b) minimize risk of injury in a street-type accident (e.g., no helmet). I would be afraid to even ask a professional shop for a quote on that type of project, as the design and fabrication labor would likely be FAR more than the work for a typical weld-in cage (which itself isn’t cheap). You could fit out the car with Sparco seats that have the removable halos and make safety nets removable so that a driver could operate the car on the street without compromising his peripheral vision.

The question then becomes what other compromises a buyer will accept in terms of performance (no AC? No radio? Stiff suspension?). Suspension alignment and tire choice would also be a big question mark - would the car race on DOT-legal tires? (I believe some classes do). What is acceptable tire life in street driving assuming the car has a track alignment? Finally, what about locking systems - all street cars have ignition and door locks, but many racers delete those systems in order to reduce potential points of failure. To capture economies of scale needed to make series production of something like this viable, I think you would need to get a critical mass of people in different markets to all agree on where those trade-offs fall. There are some companies in Europe that I think have had some luck with this, primarily selling kit cars and track day specials, but I’m not aware of many in the U.S. (only Factory Five really comes to mind)

Thanks for explaining this, it makes more sense to me. Sounds a lot like a vintage race. Just out racing to have a good time and that’s the whole goal. Nothing wrong with that!

Fran Hall runs Race Car Replicas and Superlite Cars. They compete with FFR and seem to build good products. Might be worth googling if you’re curious. I also think some would argue Radical might fit the bill here.

The other side of this coin is: My understanding is the birth of most spec series is a number of folks getting together and all building the same cars the same way so they can race them together. They write it all down and tell their friends, and the handful of car types that reach critical mass and keep growing may become national spec series. There’s no fundamental reason a new spec series couldn’t include rules like keeping the factory HVAC system in the cars. It’s all local community driven, so if everyone involved feels it’s a good call it will probably work.