My descent into madness has begun! LOL!
Monday morning I dropped my car off at Imagine Auto in KC to begin an exciting 3 part transformation of my 07 CS.
*** To be clear up front, NO I'm not getting any payment or services from any of the mentioned vendors in any shape or form. I was asked by Ken to both blog my experiences and to make this forum post for general information since this should be very interesting.
Step 1: Stephen Kaspar at iA is going to swap in an X51 crate motor from Porsche and an upgraded clutch. Coupled with my full Milltek exhaust,
Evo flow intake filter, and custom ECU tuning we expect 400HP at the crank give or take... Hopefully on the plus side... Heh!
The conversion should come in at less than $26k assuming they can reuse my existing aftermarket exhaust, and should take about 1 week with the parts already on hand.
*** Once they finish I'll pick the car up and drive back down to Houston, spend a few days driving it around the area, then drive it back up to KC. All with the purpose of putting at least 2k miles on the new engine to break it in before starting step 2.
Step 2: iA will then do a custom install of their well proven supercharger kit for the 3.8 motor. The technical details of the kit don't need to be worked out since I'll have a 997 X51 motor but the plumbing will all have to be custom fabbed to cram it all in. No hard timeframe but the expectation is around 3 weeks since it's the first one. (I'm hoping for 2 weeks but we'll see!) Rough expectation is that we'll end up with 530+ hp at the crank with the conservative 5-6 psi the kit is designed for. Initially they will be installing a front center radiator for the water to air intercooler but once it goes to step 3 two new radiators will be installed in the rear (along with air intakes/vents) and the front center radiator will be plumbed in with the existing 2 front/side radiators for general engine cooling. iA will also be putting on camber plates to allow for greater adjustability down the road.
*** Most
SC kits use a 40% improvement as their baseline power claim and starting from the 400hp we hope to get out of my X51 (with aftermarket upgrades) would put us right at 560 hp!!! so a conservative 530 hp should be very doable...
Step 3: I'm taking the car to Patritti in GA to have a custom carbon/kevlar widebody conversion done. They have existing conversions for the 996/997 and Boxster but mine will be the first Cayman so I'm working with them to nail down exactly the look I want. (Their existing stuff is sweet!) The car will have a GT2 style front end and a very Carerra GT look to the side and rear while retaining the curves of the Cayman hard top and rear fenders. The front and rear bumpers will be replaced, the front fender will be replaced, the doors will be molded, and the rear fenders will be cut and remolded. 4"s wider in the front, 7"s wider in the rear and maybe 4"s longer in the rear bumper to incorporate the Carrera GT style duck tail spoiler and a custom full underbody rear diffuser. (the rear bumper will be very similar to the Gemballa Carrera GT but with functional intercooler exhaust vents along with a vent for the engine bay heat.) The car will be stripped and completely repainted the color of my choice (probably white or maybe Atlas Grey though I'm still undecided), and we're going to be putting on 255 series tires on 9.5x19" wheels for the front, and 335 series tires on 12.5x20" wheels for the rear. I've already got Bilstein PSS9's and H&R sway bars, and coupled with the camber plates put on during stage 2 we should be able to put on an aggressive street alignment and then dial in the suspension at a track local to where Patritti works. (They are co-located with
Kinetic speed shop which is tied to Farbacher Loles). Patritti will also be putting on a custom exhaust that has dual wide exits through the rear bumper much like the Carrera GT or the Gemballa GT based on the CS, and we're also planning on a roof mounted intake to feed the dual rear intercooler radiators though we haven't decided whether to use a GT1/Gemballa Carrera GT style intake or something more like the recessed one on the Audi V12 TDI... I'm leaning towards the recessed version but we'll see which one looks best once he gets my car and mocks it up.
Right now European Car mag is definitley doing an article on the whole process and Patritti wants to take it to SEMA. I'm also blogging it here on the CS site and uploading pictures as I get them from iA. Here's a link to my blog here on the CC site, titled ITMerc's descent into madness...
http://www.caymanclub.net/blogs/5297-itmerc.html
More to follow as things progress and I get more pictures. I'll also quickly post some of the concept images in a reply to this post since this one is getting Looooong! Heh!
