For the last 2 years I’ve been racing my 2019 Porsche Cayman GT4 Clubsport MR. First in the Porsche Sprint West series and then in the Yokohama Drivers Cup series. In 2021 we went to 8 venues including Laguna Seca, Sonoma Raceway, Thunderhill Raceway, Utah Motorsports Campus, Mid Ohio, Road Atlanta, Circuit of the Americas and Road America. If your interested in seeing in-car videos of each of these venues please check them out on my Youtube channel here. It was an absolute blast with 3 races per venue. I pulled off 2nd overall for the season.
At the end of 2021 the opportunity arose to purchase two Porsche 992 GT3 Cup car’s previously used in the Carrera Cup series. Sal Brogna, my teammate in the BR Racing team, purchased one and I bought the other. My car was previously driven by Dylan Murry and was often in the top 6 finishers during the 2021 Porsche Carrera Cup season. When BR Racing received the car, they started the hard work of preparing it for racing in 2022. After removing the green wrap they rebuilt the brake calipers, installed new rotors and pads, replaced the axles, replaced the wheel bearings and hub assemblies, installed helmet cooling and coolsuit equipment and reset the communications radio and data collection system. We also had all of the wheels powder coated black. Finally, we purchased the software key from Porsche to license traction control.
Now the car was nearly ready to take out for testing. Just the wrap to make it look good. We used an outfit in LA to create and install the wrap. After some back and forth with the design we came up with the wrap you see in the top photo. A week or so later it was installed and the car was ready for testing.
Driving the GT3 Cup car
Our first test was at Arizona Motorsports Park in Goodyear Arizona, just west of Phoenix. We spent 3 days at the track and skidpad learning the car, getting used to driving it, understanding the aero capabilities, braking, and traction control. A couple of weeks later we were back running exercises in sliding the car – what a blast, I spun the car many times before figuring out how to control the slide. We did 2 more 3 day tests, one at Thunderhill and the last one back in Arizona. Ready or not, it was now time to go racing.
The car is so different from the GT4. It’s much faster, it reaches the corners quicker, goes through the gears faster, brakes in a much shorter distance, takes corners faster with much more grip, slides more, and is a lot of fun. I was looking forward to the first race with Porsche Sprint Challenge West at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca.