For anyone interested, I would like to share my experience attending last nights
PCA meeting held by the Connecticut Valley Region.
I haven't been to a
PCA meeting in about 8 years. Well, while thumbing through the 'Challenge' newsletter last week, I noticed that this month's meeting was taking place at Danbury Porsche, the dealership with whom I have my Cayman on order with. So I thought this might be a good time/place to start attending meetings again.
Danbury Porsche had the new Cayenne on display for us, and they spent a Little time bringing us up to speed on some of the new improvements and their training impressions. I was so shocked when I heard that Porsche was going to build an SUV. I thought it was blasphemous. But after taking a close look last night, I have to say, that Cayenne appears to be one kick-butt SUV. I was also very surprised to learn that it is available with a 6 speed manual shift by special order. Now that's cool... Now I don't want you to take this too literally, but while talking about 'Direct Injection', we were told that all Porsche models would be transitioning to Direct Injection within 1 year.
After the Cayenne presentation, we got to listen to Jeff Adams of KAM motor sports explain the intricacies and art of rebuilding the four cam motors that originally propelled the 550 Spyder, 356 Carrera and eventually the 904. Apparently there are only a hand full of people in the world that are qualified to do so, and Jeff is one of them. If you find yourself in need of this service, you better have $30-$50K lying around to pay for the overhaul. This was a particularly interesing topic because I just read about this engine in last months Excellence, or was it
Panorama? I can't remember.
During Jeff's presentation my poor girlfriend was dying of boredom, but I was all ears and found the discussion fascinating and very interesting. The history alone was interesting, and I was trying to absorb it like a sponge. Jeff did a good job, but I could see that if you knew little about how an internal combustion engine actually worked, you would have been lost moments after he started.
All of those gears, timing them, aligning them, the roller bearings, one pice connecting rods, multi part crankshafts and so on. I simply can't believe that Porsche went out on a limb and built an engine that was so labor intensive and downright ridiculous in design. It's amazing that the engine ever ran, and I can't imagine how many they blew up before getting it right. It's amazing what they were willing to do to make the ultimate giant killers.
The attendance of the meeting was beyond my expectation. There had to be more than 120 people there. I remember meetings being about half the size. I was scanning the room, hoping to see a familiar face, but I really couldn't remember anyone. They may be an all new crew, or it's just been to long to remember. I was wondering if there were any CaymanClub members there.
Two of the 'newbies' who introduced themselves had just bought Caymans. I had a talk with one after the meeting to try to recruit him, but he is not a computer owner/user. The other one got away before I could talk to him. Dang.....
It was nice to get back out there with all the Porsche fans again. I had forgotten how friendly Porsche-
files were. And Danbury Porsche put on a nice buffet dinner for us. If anyone here is in CT and going to be at the next meeting, please let me know. I'd love to say hello.
