Project Boxster Clubsport: Part 21 - Driving Impressions

We’ve been wrenching on “Project Boxster Clubsport” for quite a while now, and it just keeps getting better. We purchased the Porsche for a song, and have been slowly making some moves to drop the car’s weight and add a little more fun. We’re really happy with where this Boxster ended up, even though there were some fits and starts along the way. It’s an excellent Porsche, and we’ve improved the driving experience quite a lot along the way. It’s a little sad to put an end to this project, but the time has come. We’ll be keeping it, but the projects will probably be put to an end for at least a little while.

Before we get started we would need to thank Michelin. As many of you know, Michelin is a long-time sponsor of FLATSIXES.com. Recently, they have generously offered to sponsor Project Boxster Clubsport as part of their involvement with our site. Please consider checking out what Michelin has to offer by clicking their banners on this page. Without Michelin’s support, and others like them, this site really wouldn’t be possible.

Since this project car entered our lives, it’s been driven, and it’s been driven hard. We’ve racked up a massive 30,000 miles on this beast in just over two years, and it’s been an absolute riot the whole time. Between driving the car to work or just taking it for a sprint up a mountain, this Boxster has been enjoyed to its fullest for each and every one of those miles. These Porsches are getting so inexpensive that it’s worth your while to check them out and possibly pick one up as a daily driver yourself.

Our project Boxster started with very modest intentions, with a few minor cosmetic improvements, and some weight loss. Along the way a few things went wrong and we changed tack a bit. With some body damage done by an errant pickup truck in a parking lot, we were forced to transition from a nearly perfect car to one that was a bit damaged, and along the way we had a lot of fun with it.

As a nearly daily-driver, this Boxster has performed quite well. Sure there was the occasional failure, as we had a water pump failure in Monterey, California (316 miles from home), a serpentine belt idler pulley failure in Tonopah, Nevada on our way to SEMA (237 miles from home), and most recently a CV Axle Joint failure just outside of Auburn, California (100 miles from home). These aren’t really problems that are unexpected with a 130,000 mile nearly-twenty-year-old German car, so chalk it up to deferred maintenance. We’ll be spending some time going over things as we take this car out of service and give it a thorough once-over.

The car’s cosmetic changes have been a bit polarizing with some people really enjoying the levity displayed, and others lambasting the car as a ‘ricer’. I can tell you, however, that this car performs as well as the race-car vibe that it displays. With a set of super wide and super sticky Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 tires, and a full bevy of suspension accouterments, our Project Boxster is perhaps the best cornering machine we’ve ever driven. We might even put this Porsche up against a Cayman GT4 for road-holding ability, it simply has prodigious grip and almost zero body roll. It’s an excellent car for a run on a long sweeping mountain road.

The skies in our locale (Reno, Nevada) are so blue that it’s almost a crime to not drive a Porsche with the top down. As such, we’ve taken the top out of our Boxster and will be using a hard-top during the cold months. We’ve removed a lot of weight from this Porsche, mostly in insulation and unnecessary accessories. The Boxster may get more hardcore in the future, but modification is probably at a standstill for at least a while. We like enjoying the Porsche in its current form, and as winter hits, it’ll be parked in the shop for a few months.

At the end of the day, we’ve built a Porsche that we’re really happy with, and truly enjoy driving. It punches well above its weight class, and fights against much higher horsepower cars without blinking an eye. It’s a bit ragged, a bit ugly, and a bit rough around the edges, but it’s still running like a top, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Thanks for reading all about our Project Boxster Clubsport, we hope you’ve enjoyed the ride as much as we have. If you haven’t caught up on the project yet, every installment is linked at the top of this very post, so go back and check out what we’ve accomplished in a couple years with this project. You just might want to do some of these modifications to your own 986.

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