Half-Price Porsche: Shocks and camber can’t hurt, right?

We never in a million years expected to own a modern Porsche, but after buying this one with a broken transmission for just $15,000 and driving it cross-country to our Florida home, we'd torn apart the transmission and fixed it for just a few dollars. Suddenly, we had a perfectly good 981 Cayman in the garage. Most people would be perfectly content with that.

But we're not most people. We're GRM, and we can't leave anything stock, so it was time to roll our Cayman back into the shop and break out the sawzall.

Or was it? Honestly, we don't need another race car (our current tally is four, if you're keeping track).

Maybe we’re maturing, maybe we miss our GTI, or maybe we just have too many cars with cages, but after some soul searching, the Porsche’s mission became clear: Sure, we want our Cayman to be a better companion on track, but more than that we'd like it to be a fun weekend car, something we can use to join our friends for a spirited drive, take to work on a nice day, or drive to dinner. So this would be a street car first and a track car second, meaning a full interior, real street tires, and terms like “NVH” being considered.

But we also wanted uncompromising track performance, which we’ll define as such: Our Cayman should be able to run a 20-minute track session at full pace without cooking its brakes or drivetrain, and without exhibiting any miserable street car habits. (We’re looking at you, squishy suspension, terminal understeer and blinking stability control light.)

It shouldn’t exhibit any weird or inconsistent tire wear, either. Bonus points for having reasonable consumable costs and, of course, for chasing down the rest of the run group. At the end of the track day, we should be able to throw our helmet in the frunk, crank the a/c, and drive home in comfort.

Goals set, it was time to see if we could hit them. Which brings us back to the conclusion of our last update, when we maxxed out the OEM front camber adjustment on our car and dropped 2 seconds from our lap times at the Florida International Rally & Motorsports Park, our official test track. And while we posted a fast lap…we didn’t post many of them. In fact, our times were remarkably inconsistent because the stock shocks felt just plain worn-out. In a car without too much low-hanging fruit, the Cayman’s shocks were rotting on the ground.

Choosing Shocks

Time to fix them. And just for fun, we started by looking up the price of OEM replacements–hey, maybe we’d get a deal!

Or, maybe we’d be quoted $1964 for OEM struts from an online Porsche parts discounter. That’s just struts: no hardware, no springs, nothing else.

Our car doesn’t have any options besides those blingy wheels, so these are the most basic shocks you could get–no electronic adjustment, no sport suspension, nothing. Adding those options only raises the price, naturally, which quelled any thoughts we had of possibly upgrading to the OEM sport suspension for a fraction of the price of aftermarket parts.

The cheapest replacements on RockAuto cost $275 each up front (before shipping), but they didn’t have a single rear option in stock. Searching TireRack.com showed a few different options for OE replacements, all of them with limited availability and prices similar to the OEM parts from the dealer.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, the Porsche tax is absolutely real. And it’s especially obvious when parked next to a Miata.

If our wallets were going to bleed, we figured, we might as well upgrade. Spending $2500-plus for a set of sport springs and fixed-perch aftermarket struts didn’t sound reasonable, so instead we kept scrolling to the coil-over category. Adjustable spring perches would let us dial in the exact ride height (and more importantly, exact rake) we wanted, and switch the car from requiring weirdly sized Porsche springs to requiring common aftermarket sizes that we already had on the shelf. We’d be able to save some weight, too.

But coil-overs come with a downside: Normally a higher cost and worse street manners, as all of their disparate parts can rattle, clunk and screech in ways that a single-piece shock simply can’t.

And in order to cut costs, many entry-level coil-over manufacturers assemble new fitments from a parts bin of existing shock cartridges, spring rates and damping profiles, meaning a product that physically fits, but is ill tuned for the car. We’ve written at length about how entry-level coil-overs can be rebuilt and re-tuned to be great on track, but that’s not this project’s mission: We wanted a suspension setup that was super streetable and competent on track, ideally right out of the box.

What’s that mean? Öhlins says “The DFV (Dual Flow Valve) enables tuning the intermediate shock absorber speed range independently from low- and high speed damping.” Or, in English, these shocks can perform on track like stiff race car parts, but on big bumps like potholes, they can perform like soft street car parts, even with spring rates that are way stiffer than stock (the front goes from 25 to 70 N/mm, while the rear increases from 38 to 80 N/mm). Sounds like the silver bullet we were looking for.

And the price was too good to pass up: At just $3000, these are a screaming deal, and, oops, sorry that’s the price of an Öhlins Road and Track kit for a Mustang. But even with the Porsche tax, a kit for our Cayman retails for $4100. Did we mention how interesting Porsche ownership is? And to be fair, the kit for our car includes some additional hardware to mate the system up to the OEM top hats front and rear.

Adding Camber

Oh right, top hats. We’ve yet to find a stock car (especially a strut suspension car) that doesn’t benefit on track from more negative camber, so our next call was to Vorshlag Motorsports. We’re big fans of their camber plates and have used them across a zillion projects by now, but, oddly enough, they didn’t have 981 Cayman in their catalog. “But give us a few weeks,” they said, “And we’ll have them.”

Cool fact about Vorshlag: They make all their own parts thanks to a shop full of humming CNC machines, and they’re well connected to their local community of racers. Which is why, just a few weeks later, 981 camber plates were added to the Vorshlag catalog. They’d borrowed a car (thank you, Kelsey and Silvio of Safeplace Automotive!), prototyped the plates, tested, and entered production faster than some other companies could even ship their first batch across the ocean.

The price is right, too: At just $588 for the pair, Vorshlag doesn’t charge a Porsche tax and even includes upper spring perches designed for whatever coil-overs you’re installing. They claim more camber adjustment than any other design on the market, and unlike some other designs, the spherical bearing is seated within a giant radial bearing to isolate steering movement and reduces wear. That spherical is larger than anything else on the market, too.

Why not change lower control arms to get more negative camber? Simple: This option is cheaper, easier to adjust, and easier to install–we had to remove the top hats to change shocks, anyway.

Installing Parts

Decisions made and parts acquired, it was time to bolt everything on. And just like the transmission rebuild, we were again shocked at how easy this car is to work on. We didn’t even need a spring compressor in the rear–just some clever threading of the rear spring down and past its lower perch, and the stock suspension came right off the car. Shoutout to the GRM forum for demonstrating that trick for us. Then, the Öhlins setup nearly installed itself, though we got creative with the damping adjustment knob to help compress the assemblies and hold them for a few seconds while we snuck them under the fenders.

After installing the coil-overs, we corner-weighted the car on our Intercomp SW777RFX Wireless Professional Scale System, then aligned the car with a fairly conservative dual-duty alignment: Up front we dialed in 2.5 degrees of negative camber and 1/16 inch of total toe-out, while in the rear we hit 1.75 degrees of negative camber and 1/16 in of total toe-in. We set the car to half an inch of positive rake, with the front ride height measuring 4.5 inches at the pinch weld or 27.25 inches at the fender lip. We adjusted all four shocks to seven clicks out, theoretically the middle of their adjustment range. And for those playing along at home, that weight is with 160 pounds of sandbags in the driver's seat.

Is this the “right” alignment for our Cayman? Almost certainly not: As we’ve said in the past, the right way to determine your alignment settings is to test, and we found recommendations for this chassis all over the map online. We’ll call this a solid baseline, then test and iterate from here as we continue developing the car. Oh, and huge shoutout to Öhlins for putting the damping adjusters on the bottom of each shock, where they’re easy to get to without disassembling the interior every time we want to make a change.

Track Testing

Parts installed, there was only one thing left to do: Drive it! We threw our camera gear into the frunk and drove the Cayman straight to the FIRM for a track day, eager to see if we’d be any faster with the fancy shocks.

But remember, this is a street car, so our first test happened long before we arrived at the track. Halfway through the 80-mile drive, we turned to each other and blurted out, “Hey, we forgot to see if it rides any better!”

That’s probably the best endorsement we could write of the Öhlins street manners: They don’t feel like coil-overs. In fact, they barely feel like anything has changed. We’d call it a slightly stiffer ride that’s far better controlled, without the head-hitting-the-ceiling moments over big bumps that we’ve experienced with other systems. NVH is completely unchanged, even with those camber plates. We figured we’d have to make some compromises, but if anything the car rides better with the new setup. We even took our mother-in-law for a ride to confirm it just feels like a normal car.

But then we arrived at the track, threw our helmet on, and tested the other side of this equation: Track manners. Had we made our car any faster?

According to the stopwatch, not really: Our best time moved from a 1:22.85 to a 1:22.84, or a mere hundredth of a second faster. But that stopwatch doesn’t tell anywhere near the full story, so we’ll go to our VBOX data system for the real info.

Parts delays, track closures, hurricanes and magazine production schedules all conspired to add six months of time between these two tests. The FIRM’s back half–including Turns 5 and 6–was closed for months due an FAA dispute, too, and our data has shown they’ve slowed down considerably after reopening. The weather was six months warmer, too, switching from a comfortable January to a sweltering Florida summer, and we could see that in the data as both a loss of power and a rapid overheating of our Michelin Pilot Sport 4S tires.

So in summary, our Cayman wasn’t any faster: But it was exactly as quick under much slower circumstances.

And digging into the data, the reason for this increased speed was faster times through the FIRM’s most dynamic sections, including the high-speed, high-risk kink that rewards a well-controlled, predictable chassis, as well as Turn 5 immediately after it. We made up considerable time under braking, too, since we weren’t balancing a nervous chassis on the way into every corner. That’s despite drastically reducing the amount of toe-in in the rear.

Oh, and did we mention the consistency? Before we had to work hard–and get lucky–to get a fast lap. Now, though, we could click off repeatable times without taking changes–at least until the brakes and tires melted.

Conclusion

Bottom line: The Öhlins setup made our car faster–and way more fun to drive. So we pulled off track, threw our helmet back in the frunk, and cruised home with the a/c blasting.

Rather than use the radio, though, we talked about the next steps for our Cayman. The stability control was still incredibly intrusive (and impossible to turn off), and the brakes just weren’t up to the abuse we were subjecting them to. Plus, is it really a Project Car if we leave it on the stock wheels? We’ll address these issues—and more—in future updates.