Mantissport Cayman S is being readied for its second race at Sebring. Feb9-11 2007. Hope do a bit better this time.

Best of luck Ernie. Don't forget, even you DNF, a lot of us are still up North wishing we were there. Sebring is one of my favorites and look forward to your report back.

What's your set up plan? Don't forget the rain tires.

best of luck ernie!

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

Sorry to hear about the Cayman. I was so busy at the event that I never got up to your camp near turn 16 to say hello.

A 2:40 in a 944 is pretty damn good. You pretty much have to grab the brake pedal and toss it out the window to get that kind of lap time!

Thanks for the update guys. My sympathies, but also my appreciation- I had a breather tube/catch can system for a highly modified 3.2 engine in an old 911 and can relate to the aggravation of having to engineer things on race weekends. Developed a hatred for oil after that. Evil stuff.
Look forward to details and some photos. I'll be giving Mantis a call soon- first oil swap will be a good time to make the sump upgrade.

Yes 2:40's is very quick, I was expecting 2:42's. These cars are fairly light at 2600lbs. but have less tire under them that "I" class cars (225 Toyo's all around). Admittedly both of these cars were driven by young "Shoes" but it was also their first visit to Sebring. I can't wait for our first DE to get behind the wheel of one of them. As this class grows over the next few years it will be the place to race.

We are beginning to build our fourth SP1 car in five months, this one for an experienced driver who will be aiming to contest the NASA Spec944 Nationals at Mid Ohio in September. With that in mind he is having the chassis media blasted to remove all of the undercoating and excess paint. Then we will be building the car up from a bare chassis with a thin coat of paint on it. New engine, torque tube and gearbox. Should be a killer car in this class.

What we did not mention was the attendance at Sebring. We were a few hours late getting to the track on Thursday and that put us at the far end of the paddock near corner 16. Yes, a PCA club race filled the paddock at Sebring! I don't know all of the facts and statistics but I think it was the largest PCA race attendance ever, about 280 cars. 66 Cup Cars, the largest ever gathering of these vehicles. They even had a photo shoot as a momento. Needless to say they had their own race start.

CupCarVet;

Somehow we got one of the lines wrong, pinched it or something, this caused some oil starvation to something in the engine and it began to score. Fortunately, Ernie is a very astute driver and shut it down before it got worse. Hopefully it will be a relatively inexpensive repair (it could have been terminal if he continued).

I think we are going to eliminate the old "drain the catch tank" senerio that you fondly remember from your 911 days. We are attempting to have the oil deposited in the tank as a buffer, then have that tank drain the oil back into the sump, eliminating the need for constant inspection and draining.

I have your name on a Sump Extension kit when you are ready.

Stan