Nick Tandy and Patrick Pilet took the first win of the 2016 IMSA Racing season for the Porsche 911 RSR on Sunday, but only after a move by team mate, Fred Makowiecki, pushed the leading Corvette off the victory trail. This left Corvette driver, Tommy Milner, and a truckload of ‘Vette fans on social media not very happy at all.
‘Vette driver vents
“I just got wrecked basically,” said Milner. “Two Porsches running nose to tail… it is pretty clear what happened there. It is pretty disappointing that this is the kind of racing we have here, where we are better than that for sure.
“[Being taken out] is disappointing but certainly could have been a lot worse. I don’t mind finishing second if it is clean and it happens the right way, but that wasn’t the right way. It hurts a little bit to be second in this case the way it happened, but again, end of the day second place is great points for us. We can hold our heads high that we raced as hard as we could today, the right way.”
The Corvette fan comments on the above Youtube video are not too surprising:
“Seems to be a common occurrence with the Porsche’s “missing” their braking points when the ‘Vettes are around.”
“The Porsche team needs to be disqualified. No words can explain how disgusted I am from seeing this type of dirty racing.”
“First time I saw it I thought maybe I’d have another look and Freddy probably just got excited thought he’d go for the win. But then I watched it again. Looks damn deliberate and looks like Tandy knew it was coming too or he would have been in it.”
“Porsche playing dirty as usual. I expect that from a company that makes cars with IMS design flaws.” (lol)
“It was completely deliberate. When you see it from the overhead view it’s obviously a dick move to get Porsche team the win.”
Fred takes blame: tidy Tandy takes win
“After two third places we finally had every opportunity to win today, but we didn’t use it,” said Fred. “The first blow was the penalty for being too fast in the pit lane. The collision in the penultimate lap was my fault: I was a touch too optimistic heading into the corner.”
“That was a fantastic race,” said Nick Tandy (below). “Despite the minor setbacks, we never gave up, we believed in ourselves, and we fought to the flag. Our victory was well earned. We’ve had so much bad luck this season, so now it was our turn to shine.”
Things happen in the heat of the moment in racing, when drivers are trying to pass the car in front while simultaneously fending off another car jammed up their tailpipes. In this case, the chasing car was a Le Mans winner and team mate in an identical 911, who was in no way inclined to hold station. The notion that Fred crashed into a Corvette to deny himself victory while giving Tandy yet another Porsche win makes no sense. The Porsche claim that Fred thought he saw a split-second gap and pointed his car towards it? More likely and the stewards clearly agreed or he’d have been out. Bad news for the Corvette, but 911s have been denied victory for less many times in the past.
There are plenty of quick Porsche juniors coming through the ranks getting ready to race, and it’s about time Porsche started testing young female drivers, so small wonder that works pilots are pushing hard to shove their cars into every gap possible. Of course we like Porsches to win, but put Tandy, Pilet (above) or Bamber in Corvettes and I’d be happy to see any of them finishing first. They are just racers, plain and simple. Winning by being there, ready to make the most of every opportunity is what matters to these guys.
I know a lot of Porsche fans have Corvettes in the garage (looking at you for one, Mr Gagen) – be interested to get your viewpoint.
Opened my emails yesterday morning to find a late-night message from the Yorkshire Bullet: Mark Bates from EB Motorsport. “Testing at Silverstone with Tuthills tomorrow, come over for a catch up if you’re free.” Five minutes later, I had thrown on a Tuthill top and was in the Cayenne, en route to Silverstone.
After eleven sunny Northamptonshire miles, I arrived at the circuit and found the garage but no sign of Tuthills. Instead, Mark was there with top man Neil Bainbridge from BS Motorsport and a smart RSR in Brumos colours. Tuthills had asked Mark to come down and test drive the RSR with the owner (who also owns a few Tuthill-built cars), trying the setup and suggesting some tweaks ahead of the car’s first outing this year for the CER race at Spa Francorchamps.
After many race miles in the two EB 3-litre racecars and the super 1965 911 that did so well at Goodwood last year, Mark is an excellent 911 test driver and has previously set up a number of non-EB 911 race cars, for circuits in the UK and Europe. He jumped at the chance to try an original RSR, making a five-hour round trip to have a go. The great weather was a real bonus.
Having already made a few misguided assumptions that morning, why hold back and break the habit of a lifetime, so I shot straight into another one, assuming this was the replica Brumos car built by Tuthills a few years ago, now fitted with BS Motorsport 3-litre power. Asking the owner about the new engine’s recipe, he smiled and put me straight. “This is the RSR that won the 1973 Mexico 1000 kms.”
Brumos Porsche 911 RSR 911 360 0865
Chassis number 911 360 0865 was delivered to Peter Gregg at Brumos in April 1973 (happy 43rd birthday). Fitted with the 911/72 engine – a naturally aspirated 2808cc flat six making 308 bhp at 8k rpm – the car was sold to Mexico’s Hector Rebaque, who owned it until mid 1977. In the years he had the car, Hector took three wins in Mexico City, twice on the famous 1000 kms race.
After Hector, the car went to Guatemala for a while, eventually ending up with our friends at the Blackhawk Collection, who sold it back to Europe: first living an Italian collector for twenty years, and then to another Porsche collector in Monaco, who had it restored by the now-defunct Scuderia Classica at the start of this decade. I don’t yet have the full story of how the current owner came to possess it, but watch this space.
The track day was organised by my next-village neighbours at Goldtrack, who run a tight ship and bring in some very nice cars as a result. Parked up amongst the latest supercars and plenty of race machinery, this air-cooled classic Porsche turned few heads beyond the cognoscenti, until Bates turned the key and got the engine started.
Porsche 911 Track Day Noise
Even with tailpipe extensions, intended to mute the exhaust a touch for track day dB meters, this Porsche has a proper bark on startup. The engine has a tight, pursed tickover that is so much sweeter than the all-bass soundtracks of later Porsches sporting exhaust systems apparently designed originally for industrial chimneys. I feel an audiophile comparison of most attractive tickovers coming on.
Rolling out into the pitlane, the roofline of the tall RSR runs well above the massed Radicals, Ginettas and Scuderia Ferraris that dominate Silverstone’s start-of-race-season track days. But with 300 bhp pushing less than 1000 kilos along, it goes down the road rather nicely.
“I’ve already spun it once,” Bates confesses. “Fourth lap, pushed a bit too hard and the back just came around. It’s not what our car would have done.” I asked him what else felt different to his own 3.0 RSR build, which has proved so successful in historic racing in the seven years he’s been racing it, winning back-to-back Masters Historic titles and last year’s Nürburgring Trophy race (rumour has it that Germany’s cancelled the race now the English have won it).
Porsche 911 RSR 2.8 vs 3.0-litre
“They are quite different cars. Ours feels sharper after so many years of development. It’s lighter – closer to 920 kilos than the 970 or so of this one – so our brakes bite harder and suspension has a bit less to do. It’s not quite surgical in its precision, as no air-cooled car could ever be surgically precise, but our car is very sharp and reactive to drive. This one feels authentic to the period: very 1970s.”
Testing went well, with the RSR showing a clean pair of heels to most modern machinery. It flew past me on the old pit straight, holding its own against a featherweight Radical and shrugging off modern 991 GT3 RS and new BMW M3s. The delight in seeing real RSRs used with such glorious abandon – the owner encouraging Mark to thrash it and see what it is utimately capable of – was a joyous experience. Ultimately, it was left to Mark to decide how hard he drove it.
A video posted by The Cult of Porsche (@cultofporsche) on
“It’s not my car and we’ve already been ticked off for noise and told to keep it under 7k rpm, but there’s enough going on to see what could be looked at. Our car runs lower gear ratios, which offer more opportunies to exploit the engine’s torque. We have some suspension tweaks specific to our car and this year we also have our own dyno-developed exhaust system coming. That makes a difference to the power on tap.”
“It’s been a good morning and we’ve learned quite a bit, changing tyre pressures and moving some ballast around,” said Neil, who has extensive personal experience of racing 2.8 and 3.0-litre RSRs. When I suggested that he may have been one of the last people to race a proper 2.8 RSR around Silverstone in period (not including club races and historics since then), he had a think before sharing a great story of racing a non-turbo RSR against an Autofarm 934 back in the day. But that’s a tale for another time.
The Porsche 919 LMP1 Hybrid was gifted a win at the opening round of the 2016 FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC) season after the actual race winning Audi R18 was excluded in post-race scrutineering due to an excessively worn skidblock.
The skidblock under the front of Audi’s latest WEC challenger was found to be less than 20mm thick, contravening the FIA technical regulations, thereby ruling the car out of the final results. The second-placed Porsche 919 LMP1 of Romain Dumas, Neel Jani and Marc Lieb.
Porsche WEC Crash Video
Jani had set the fastest race lap, with a time of 1:40.303: just six-tenths of a second slower than the 919’s fastest time around Silverstone over the course of last weekend, which was set by Brendon Hartley in Free Practice 2. Hartley came a cropper in the race, however, when contact with the Gulf Racing Porsche 911 of Mike Wainwright on lap 71 led to a huge accident for car number 1, which had built up a comfortable lead in the hands of Mark Webber. Both drivers escaped unharmed, but the damage to the 919 won’t be buffing out. Here’s some video:
Hartley’s post-race statement took no prisoners. “I wanted to get past a GT car on the outside, which is quite normal through there, but the driver didn’t see me and used all of the road. I don’t want to blame anyone, it was a shocking moment and a true shame.” The stewards saw the cause of the crash rather differently, laying the blame with Brendon while noting: “you are reminded that LMP1 drivers are liable for the way they overtake slower cars such as LMP2 and especially LM GTE cars.”
Sixth position in GTE-Pro was the best the 911 RSR could manage after problems with a pit stop. The Ferraris of Rigon/Bird and Bruni/Calado came home first and second, followed by Turner/Sörenson/Thiim in the Aston, with a brace of Ford GTs making up the top five. In six hours of racing, the 911 RSR of reigning GT champions, Michael Christensen and Richard Lietz, clocked up 154 laps versus the wining Ferrari’s 167 laps overall: a sizeable gap to the front. We’ll have to see how the season pans out: Porsche is holding station with customer teams only for the old 991 while the new 911 racecar is in development.
The next race on the 2016 WEC Calendar is the 6 hours of Spa Francorchamps on May 7. The 911 should do well if it rains in Belgium.
My much-loved 2004 Porsche Cayenne S (4.5 V8) behaved itself for most of this winter just gone, apart from a couple of minor hiccups. The first required a battery change, but the other was a little more challenging.
I should have seen it coming when the Cayenne would very occasionally take a few of seconds of cranking to get started when hot. I assumed it was some sort of fuel boil-off to do with the LPG system, but then it was a random occurrence and perhaps also happened when running on petrol.
Porsche Cayenne Poor Running
A few weeks ago, I filled up with LPG and was just driving away when I was forced to do an emergency stop. The hard braking caused the Cayenne to cut out and it was a bit of a pig to get started again. Eventually it did start, but would not pull away from junctions cleanly once I got it going. I thought it might be something to do with the emergency braking system (an Audi I once drove had something like this) so I pulled over, reset the systems and drove off, apparently cured.
The next day, the problem was back, with poor acceleration on the school run. I emailed Chris at JZM and asked what he thought. There were a few suggestions, but he could stick it on their Porsche PIWIS the following day to be sure. Next morning, I dropped the kids to school and headed for Kings Langley, where we plugged it in and read the fault codes.
There were a few things on there (as usual for any Cayenne), but one I had been looking for: crankshaft position sensor fault. The ECU said it had last happened at 41k miles, but first happened at 63k miles even though the car was now on 157k miles. I couldn’t see anything else. Mike had a good look through everything – bit of a pain as the Cayenne takes ages to give up its codes and the PIWIS diagnostic walk-throughs only work on post-2006 cars – before deciding to do a master reset, run it again, then read the codes and see what was showing.
Cayenne Crankshaft Position Sensor Failure
Having done the reset, the Cayenne wouldn’t start. It would crank and crank but no start. Complete failure in the best possible place: a decent independent Porsche workshop! We left it a while and then like magic it started fine. As the last major fault code had been for crankshaft position sensor, we agreed this was the first thing to change. I borrowed a courtesy car and Mike changed the sensor the following day, which seemed to cure the problem.
Thoughts since the change? Wow, what a difference. Things the Cayenne used to do which mildly annoyed me have all disappeared. It starts first time, every time, and pulls cleanly from anywhere in the rev range: easily the smoothest it has been in my 40k miles of ownership. Still needs flicking down a gear when you really want to get moving, but a huge improvement overall.
If you’ve got a 955 Cayenne with 100k miles or more and it’s on the original CPS, get it changed and bring your Cayenne back to full health, before it leaves you stranded. Will be a bit of a nightmare job, as the plug is in quite a tight spot behind the top of the engine, but “it’s not that bad” according to Mike. One tip on where to get the part: as official Bosch agents, JZM bought my crank position sensor straight from Bosch and saved me quite a few quid. Good work!
PS: I collected the Cayenne and brought it home. That night, this happened (above). I was not pleased! Three other cars around it were also keyed so it wasn’t an anti-Porsche thing. My Polo was parked in front of it and that was not keyed, so it wasn’t an anti-me thing either. Such is life.
To read more of my work, commission my valuation expertise or hire my content generation skills, you can:
Our man in Portugal, José Luis Stock, recently sent me some photos from the official press launch of the Porsche Boxster 718, the turbocharged four-cylinder car which Stuttgart has seen fit to rebrand with the iconic 718 label, presumably to head off criticism that real Porsche sports cars have flat-six engines. Personally, I don’t think anyone would have been that bothered and they could have left it alone, but what do I know.
José is the brother of Fernando Stock, famous Portuguese rally driver of the 1950s who took a Porsche 356 to the Monte Carlo Rally back in the day. José is a man who still loves his Porsches, so it must have been a pretty cool experience to walk into a car park and find the very latest Porsche sports car parked in front of him: yet another upside to living in sunny Southern Europe.
Porsche Boxster 718 reviews
Reviews of the Porsche Boxster 718 have been circulating for a week or so, and the general consensus amongst road test editors is that it’s a reasonable effort. EVO magazine’s Dan Prosser is one of my Porsche road test benchmarks and his review of the new Boxster S was an interesting read, particularly for his robust remarks on the character of Porsche’s new four-cylinder engine.
“Even with the sports exhaust fitted, the new engine is fairly characterless in the way it sounds,” says Prosser. “It doesn’t want for volume at idle and the sound is a dirty, gruff sort of warble with Subaru undertones, but it isn’t tuneful. Unfortunately, it doesn’t improve once on the move and with the roof up it’s actually very droney. The note does harden over the final 1000rpm, but the long and short of it is that the Boxster is no longer a car that can be enjoyed for the way it sounds.”
Not quite what the Doctor would have ordered if he were still with us, and even less so when the price is factored in. The new Boxster S costs a staggering £50,695. Add five grand more for ceramic brakes, a grand for 20″ wheels and £1100 for Sport Chrono Plus. Hard to believe that a new Boxster S is the best thing you can do with £60k of hard-earned, but UK Porsche sales are up year-on-year.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish.AcceptRead More
Privacy & Cookies Policy
Privacy Overview
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
