Top Speed

[Riverside]

ORIGINAL: zcacogp
No concerns at all.

Mine was little floaty over 130 on the tom-tom without the engine undertrays, with them fitted (I have the rear metal one too) it's stable up to at least 145 (ran out of room).

I agree it's not the brightest idea to try & vmax a car but sometimes it's fun to just go for it []

 

[RC18B 911 turbo]

ORIGINAL: Fen

ORIGINAL: RC18B 911 turbo

Welcome back Fen. How is it in New Zealand?

Sorry I didn't mean to ignore you Jon. NZ is great, absolutely no regrets whatsoever. I guess there are a few things I might miss, but there are a lot more that I'm glad to have left behind.

Is your car at T&T?

Glad you're enjoying it over there, it's good to have no regrets over anything that you do I guess.

Nah my car's at PPI in Newton Abbot, I forgot about T&T somehow which isn' t good considering they done a good job on my car when I took it in to them last time. Probably be another month or so until I get it back anyway at the moment though.

 

[stevespic]

Just got back from germany this weekend with the car and i couldnt resist a few short blasts.... The speedo was reading around 145 but the tomtom was saying 141 at my last glance... the car got there nice and quick and felt solid and well in control... even though the cars tyres sounded like they were going to explode but i guess thats what you get for having removed the sound proofing and having 265 35 18s on the rear ! I still loved it though [][][].

 

[944Turbo]

ORIGINAL: charles.y

ORIGINAL: Fen

The cab has nowhere near as good handling as the coupe. I once missed my intended line on a bumpy corner by about 3 feet (admittedly with 18s on it) simply because it "walked" wide. It was a much nicer car with the 16s on it, but it still could shudder on a big bump.
....

Welcome back to the forum Fen.
For those who may not already know, Steve Kevlin defended and won his PCGB racing champion title in 1990 in a S2 cab (he won the same title in a coupe in 1989). He must be a very good driver then if the Cab is not that good enough[]. Or the cab that he raced was so much modified (hey there's no rollcage). Or both [].

I'll think you'll find it did have a roll cage when it was raced, that was the autosport show in January sometime before the season. If I remember correctly ( I have a photo at home somewhere) it had at least two hoops over the top of the drivers head and was fairly substantial looking.

Tony

 

[944Turbo]

Quite happy to max my car when the opoortunity allows, on a racetrack / private road / in Germany etc. Havent been over 165GPS yet as it takes a while to add more speed then, Need to go back to the nurburgring and have some more high speed runs whilst away. Especially now my gearbox cooler no longer leaks Didnt fancy a gearbox faiure at V. high speed
Tony

 

[Fen]

To reply to several posts: I don't think that the S2 cab would have been allowed to race in the series without a cage and I'm positive it had one. That alone addresses the chassis flex issue of course. Secondly I have heard that the cab was chosen for the lower CoG (as I said in my earlier post on the subject) which is a result of the double floor pan and bracing. I'd actually be inclined to think it was more a marketing led decision to try to help sell the cabrio version after it took so long to get a production standard version developed. In no way do I intend to slight the driving ability of Steve Kevlin and he may well have been a significantly superior driver to his competitors in order to get a car with a weight penalty across the line first. Clearly he had the best available support package of course, which had to help.

Don't get me wrong, I love the cab. I have said before, and although it's extremely unlikely ever to happen it still holds true, that if I ever buy another 944 it will be a Turbo cab. I made my comments in response to a suggestion (by a Turbo cab owner ironically) that while a magazine article had suggested the cab was flexible (or at least that is my understanding, not having had the benefit of seeing the article in question) that is is not. Well I know for a fact the cab can be wobbly so I wanted to make that clear and dispute what I know to be mis-information.

If anyone else who has covered tens of thousands of miles in both coupe and cabrio variants of the 944 thinks differently then I'll have to agree to disagree with their judgement, but to anyone not claiming that level of experience then I respectfully suggest I know better than you do.

I wouldn't VMax a car I wasn't intimately familiar with nor happy with mechanically any more than I'd pay someone to work on my car if I didn't trust them implicitly to do a good job. You can be just as dead following a legal speed mechanical failure as a very high speed one after all.

My Turbo is still in Devon. I'm not sure what to do with it as in a way it's daft to sell it given what it's worth now against what I have spent on it, but if I go to the trouble and cost of shipping it I don't know what I'd do with it over here.