What does a performance alignment look like? | Project Porsche 997 | Porsche 911 Carrera | Project Car Updates

Our Porsche 997 scored rave reviews at its first track outing: “It’s so good that there is no way to do anything to make it better without ruining it,” JG Pasterjak reported.

But maybe we can make it a little better? Before taking our Porsche 997 back to the Florida International Rally & Motorsports Park, we wanted to check and optimize our car’s alignment specs.

Geoff Thompson, our long-time buddy, has aligned most of our race cars for years. He is also quite knowledgeable on the Porsche 911.

He warned us that without Porsche GT3 adjustable lower control arms, we would be disappointed in how much negative camber we could achieve up front. Still, before we just start spending money and replacing parts, we thought we should check and see what kind of adjustment was available before ordering new control arms.

With the stock front control arms, a Porsche 997 at stock ride height can only get about a half degree of negative on each side. To keep the tires happy on both the track and street, we’d like a degree to a degree and a half up front.

After setting negative camber to the maximum of about half a degree, we set toe at zero. At the front of the car, toe-out will provide better turn-in but you can go too far. For more about alignments, read this article: What Is Camber, Caster and Toe?

At the rear, with the stock parts we can get quite a bit of negative camber as our Porsche had close to 2 degrees on the right and about 1 degree on the left. We balanced both sides to 1.5 degrees of negative camber–this should offer a good street/performance compromise. Geoff set toe-in at about 1/16 inch at the rear.