Goal Oriented - My journey with the Porsche Owners Club

[Mr9146]

About two years ago I was driving to work in my 74 911 and I started thinking about how I wanted to get more out of my 911 ownership experience. At that point I'd owned some sort of hotrod early Porsche for about 17 years, but I had only ever used the car as a street car. I'd done a number of track days here and there, I'd done the long distance touring, and I'd done the various shows and events that populate the Porsche calendar. However, I felt like something was missing from the overall experience.

Ruminating in stop and go driving I realized what was missing. It dawned on me that I wanted to drive fast ... my Porsche needed to stretch its legs. However, it also dawned on me that I do not have the financial means to pay speeding tickets and/or the increased insurance premiums that come with driving like a bat out of hell in Los Angeles. But I mean, who doesn't like driving fast in their Porsche? The only logical move was to take it to the track, and from my experience the Porsche Owners Club offered the best track program in So Cal.

Now, I've been doing track days with my various Porsches since I was a teenager, and I have logged a lot of hours behind the wheel of a lot of different kinds of Porsches, but it was very important to me that I treated this experience as though I was totally green. I wanted to start at the bottom and work my up through the POC program ... no skipping steps, no leapfrogging the program ... I wanted to know exactly what it would be like to come into the POC program with a street car and work my way up to Cup Racing.

These are some photos of me in the yellow 74 at my first POC event in 2013 ... on street tires and with a bone stock suspension setup.

[Darren65]

Looking forward to this, subscribed

[jos.hall]

Subscribed as well

[ibmiked]

You look much better with a helmet on.

[Mr9146]

You look much better with a helmet on.

That's not any kind of breaking news story, Mike.

[uptheorg]

subscribed

+1 to IBMIKED's comment

[Mr9146]

A little background on the yellow car for those who don't know: I bought the car from a client in late 2010 with the intention of making it a solid street car. I sold the motor out of it to offset my costs, took out the Sparco seats, took out the massive torsion bars (this will factor in later) and Weltmeister sway bars, and I installed my 2.5L twin plug motor, rebuilt the gearbox, rehabbed the suspension (stock torsion bars, new bushings, new ball joints, new wheel bearings, etc.), installed a Recaro Rallye II on the driver's side and a factory 80s sport seat on the passenger side, installed 930 brakes, did some minor rust repair, and then I started racking up the miles. I used the car as a daily commuter, weekend canyon carver, and I did a tour of the East Coast from Canada to New York and then drove it back to Los Angeles.

When I made the decision to go racing with the POC I wanted the experience to be a street car/weekend warrior experience ... drive to the track, race all weekend, then drive the car to work on Monday. I wanted to go to every event on the POC calendar for the season. Would the car be able to do it? Would I suffer mechanical breakdowns? Would I be competitive? I really had no idea, but it seemed like a good goal.

The first event was like dipping your toe in the water to check the temperature. In all honesty I felt a little bit out of place - yeah, I knew some people, but I had the oldest (and dirtiest) car in the paddock and I just kind of kept to myself. I was signed up to run the PDS Series which, in a nutshell, is the POCs driver education series. I signed up for the middle group because I had a fair amount of track experience but I didn't want to sign up for the advanced group and find myself a fish out of water. I was paired up with an instructor who happened to be the Chief Driving Instructor (lucky me, right?), and he rode shotgun for the first half of the day to make sure that I knew where I was going on the racetrack and that I wasn't going to be a danger to myself or to those around me.

In all honesty, part of me was insulted by the idea that I needed an instructor to ride along with me at the Streets of Willow. Heck, I'd been driving that course since the late 90s so having a "babysitter" in the car with me was annoying. On the other hand, I took a step outside of myself and set my ego aside and looked at the bigger picture - what could this guy teach me? After all, he is the CDI for the PDS Series. Maybe there are some things that I could stand to learn about the track that will help me to improve my driving and car control as well as my lap times. When I shelved the ego and looked at it as a learning experience, and I found that there was A LOT that I didn't know. Yes, I had very good car control skills and a good seat-of-the-pants-o-meter from all my time in Porsches, but being able to push the car to the outer limits of what it could do - and beyond - opened up a whole new LEVEL of skill sets that needed to be developed. Not to mention the fact that I there were plenty of places on the racetrack where I was giving up time.

At the lunch break - sandwiches, chips, and drinks were supplied by the POC that day - I looked around the room and saw that everyone was engaged in conversations with people they knew (well that's what it looked like to me). I saw an empty space at one of the tables and just went over and started to eat my lunch alone - despite what you may think, I'm actually not the most personable individual. A guy walks up to me and introduces himself as Andrew; turns out, we actually had met a year or so prior when he brought his GT3 by the shop. Once he said that I recognized him and we started chatting. Imagine my surprise when I found out Andrew was actually the President of the POC! He was very welcoming and we talked a lot about my goal for the season. It was a great experience and when I went back out on track I did so with a renewed excitement and sense of purpose.

The PDS event was actually a two-day event (Saturday and Sunday), an although I had planned to go to both days I found that by 5pm on Saturday I was completely shagged; an hour drive home and a 4am wake-up call for the next day didn't sound so appealing to me, so during the end-of-day meeting/awards ceremony I found a local hotel on the internet ... The Springhill Suites by Mariott ... another fortuitous event during my first weekend with the POC.

The Springhill Suites turned out to be the POC host hotel. They offered a discounted rate, and I found out later in the season that they also put aside blocks of rooms for the POC racers so there are always rooms, even when the local soccer tournaments are taking place. I also found a local Mexican restaurant that has since become THE place to go for POC racers looking for some non-crappy food when spending the night in Lancaster.

By the end of the weekend I was completely hooked. My times had gotten progressively faster and I was outperforming a lot of guys in their brand new Porsches. I wound up classifying the car in the GT-5 class and my closest competition was a guy in 1976 Carrera 3.0 street car, a guy in a fully race-prepped 1970 911T with RSR bodywork and a 3.2. The three of us would find ourselves neck and neck in the points race throughout the season, but eventually the 1970 911T walked away from us in the points. But the RSR was trailered to and from the track, so it was really down to the 3.0 Carrera and myself. I got 3rd place on Saturday and 2nd place on Sunday ... all in all not a bad way to kick off the year. Plus, the car made it through the weekend without a hitch and I drove it to work on Monday.

Looking back on the day I find myself remembering a couple of specific details:

1) The POC runs a great driver education program. It offers Porsche owners new to the racetrack experience and opportunity to get their feet wet at speed, but it does so with an emphasis on safety. The PDS Program requires the student to get four separate instructor signatures from four separate events before the student is awarded their PDS License. With a PDS License the student is then permitted to participate in the PDS events without the need for an instructor ride-along. It also allows the student to progress to the next level of the POC program ... Time Trial.

2) The people were absolutely great. Everyone was welcoming and helpful, and the experienced drivers seemed willing to spend their free time helping the newer drivers learn the course and to answer questions about car control and track behavior.

3) There are not a lot of vintage cars running around out there. Aside from myself and the guy with the 76 Carrera there were maybe only a handful of air-cooled Porsches. The water-pumpers dominate the landscape, but a competent driver in a vintage 911 can oftentimes outrun someone in a newer 911, Cayman, or Boxster. It felt good to be the underdog.


As the season progressed I found myself looking into ways to improve my lap times. The first thing I did was get a set of R compound tires, but finding 15" competition rubber is no easy feat these days. The Toyo R888 turned out to be my best choice for a dual-purpose tire ... 225/50X15 in front with 235/50X15 rear. I spent the next half-season figuring out their limits, and boy was that a blast. However, R compound tires exposed the next major issue that needed to be attended to...

[Veronica87911]

Marco, looking forward to more of this!

BTW, how is that crazy cat of yours?

[GT3DE]

However, R compound tires exposed the next major issue that needed to be attended to...

suspension setup?

[Chuck Miller]

GREAT thread Marco..........

And I was there for some of it.............