Die Welt ist Flach - My Porsche Cayman adventures

The paint underneath the adhesive showed some promise:

A couple gallons of 3M adhesive remover and a whole lot of elbow grease later, we were getting somewhere:

Some time with the buffer and things were looking pretty good:

I'd say it's pretty good for a 10' car:

Drove around for the first time since March.  It was a pretty happy reunion!

New tires for this year, I went with the Yokohama Advan Apex V601.  So far I really like them, they're as grippy on the street as the outgoing R-S4s, and they're quieter and better over bumps.

The batteries in the TPMS sensors were all reporting low in the computer, so I decided to replace them this tire change.  I went with the universal Autel 1-Sensor, and their inexpensive programming tool.  It took a few tries to get right, but the TPMS won't nag me anymore:

Now that we're back to 100%, a friend with a Z4 invited me out to Tail of the Dragon since he had never been there before.  So we hit the road early in the morning.

We arrived via the Cherohala Skyway, did a few passes of the dragon, had a picnic lunch at some waterfalls, and then headed back to Nashville.

Well, this will be the last update.  The car spent most of Covid sitting in the garage, as I went through some precarious employment situations.  I did manage to catch a nice backroads drive on a sunny day.

Carvana offered me more than I paid for the car in 2018, and it seemed silly not to take it.

Thus concluded this particular car adventure.  With the benefit of hindsight, it was cool that I got to check Porsche ownership off my bucket list; but I don't think I'd want to own one again.  A bit too much of a rollercoaster I guess, when the car was good it was really good, and when it was bad it was really bad.

Money aside, here's some of the things that influenced my decision to sell the car:

• The interior surfaces were prone to scratches in the soft touch coating and many of the moving parts tended to break from the brittle plastic used.  It really feels like they do this on purpose so that you trade up to a new one every few years.
• I could never get used to the variable steering ratio.  Around 20 degrees of steering angle it transitions from 17:1 to 13.5:1.  This is fine when you're cruising on the interstate, or constantly making tight turns like tail of the dragon; but trackdays and more sweeping corners that require a slower steering input always felt clumsy to me.
• I could never solve the coolant intermittently overflowing.
• The rock guards were going to be another huge vinyl peeling project, likely ending with more missing paint and another trip to the body shop.

There is potentially a new project soon....