How to Turn Your Road-Going Porsche into a Snarling, Turbocharged Race Car

Cenk Papila September 14, 2017

If you’re a car enthusiast, you’re probably well aware of the “build your own” feature on any automaker’s website. I’m sure you’ve spent countless hours building your dream car with the perfect exterior/interior colour combos, the most badass rims, and carbon fibre everything. I spent today customizing a standard Porsche Cayman S from Porsche’s online car configurator into a whip I could take from the road to the track.

There’s something very special about driving a Porsche. Maybe it’s that the design language has barely changed since I was a teenager and it’s tugging on those nostalgic heartstrings. Or maybe it’s the sheer thrill of driving a German sports car. I’m not sure, but what I do know is I took a 718 Porsche Cayman S with a base price of $76,800 and upgraded it with almost $40,000 worth of equipment, transforming it into a $117,710 beast.

I took the recommendation of John Cappella, managing director at Porsche Centre North Toronto, whose favourite customization is adding Alcantara to the interior. “It’s a material that is often used for race car steering wheels, seats, and shift levers,” he says. “It provides the driver with better grip of the wheel and shift level, and helps keep the driver firmly in place in the seat when going around corners.”

My Porsche’s steering wheel and roof liner are now covered in sleek, sexy Alcantara.

To that I added the $3,480 Sport Design package, the $2,920 20″ Carrera sport wheels, the $2,900 sport exhaust system (so my “race car” sounds like a race car), and the most crucial and expensive option to turn my Porsche into a proper race car: the $8,450 Porsche Ceramic Composite Brakes.

And since I’m not trying to be subtle here, I added the $2,950 Miami blue exterior colour option inspired by the Tullman Walker GT3, sponsored by PCNT. Add in a few more bells and whistles, like my racing yellow seatbelts, instrument dials, and sport chrono stopwatch, and my Cayman is now ready for the track.

After speaking with PCNT, they think the best thing to do to get a feel for pricing and customizations is check out the ‘Build Your Own Porsche’ feature yourself. And should you ever get bored of that (which we highly doubt), you can try your hand at building your own Porsche-designed megayacht.