Hi Folks;

OK the bad news is we DNS'd. The good news is, we now know why. Here is our story of Sebring.

Ernie and I were looking forward to returning to Sebring, it is were we first ran the car last year, and we were both excited about the possibilties of running the car there, now that it is competitive. We had made many changes to the car, revised front grills for cooling and new "Stealth" look front-end treatment has made the car look more aggressive but no less beautiful.

Ernie also spent considerable time during the off-season working on the oil ingestion issues common with the Cayman and Boxster, we are determined to solve this. Our sump extension and windage tray goes a long way to solving the problem, we are happy with this and so are our customers who have fitted this product. It still remains, however, that under extreme racing loads and certain attitudes that oil can find its way into the intake. Not good.

So we began to design an oil breather modification to prevent this, kind of a re-routing effort using a catch-tank to buffer the oil destined for the intake and draining this back into the sump. The plumbing is quite complicated to do with the engine in the car but Ernie got it done and off we went to defeat everything that could move at Sebring.

On the second lap of the second practise the MantisSport Cayman S emerged from corner 17 behind a 944 Turbo, a certain victim for our wonder car. When the 944 began to pull away, I got on the radio and asked Ernie what the problem was. Engine, is all he needed to say. It seems we got one of the hoses wrong and the engine was not happy. Ernie shut it down to prevent damage and we parked the car for the weekend. Another lesson learned. We used a race weekend for a test session and lost. We know better than to do this but it is winter in Canada so...

The engine is now OUT of the car and we are completing the breather modifications where we can see everything. The system will work and as of yesterday Ernie is confident in this. Having, now, gone to the effort of removing the engine he now thinks it could be applied to street cars as well. More on this to come.

We have secured an additional engine so we can now develop this with-out disassembling the racecar. It is an expense we were trying to avoid but now, after not being able to start the race, we have to consider this an investment.

That is our story of Sebring 07, not nearly as exciting as our experience in 06 but life is not always fair is it. We will be at Road Atlanta at the end of March. We will be ready this time.

On a happier note, we ran our two 944 SP1 cars at Sebring. The second car we built, driven by a young hot shoe FF driver, Matt White from Toronto, set the class lap records for all three session, practise, qualifying and race. His fastest time was a 2:40, this is very quick for a 150HP 944 at Sebring.

Stan