Project Boxster
1998 Porsche Boxster 2.5
Welcome to the latest addition to the Lord Motorsport portfolio. This Boxster project will be a collaboration between Norton Sport and Lord Motorsport. Norton Sport is a company run by a good friend of mine that focuses on the promotion of high end sport activities. Born out of a personal passion for sports, like Lord Motorsport; they also deal with Polo and Clay shooting too.
Here we will document it’s transformation.
What have we got?
With a slightly sketchy history, this Boxster was picked up relatively cheaply but seems to be in good order. It actually had a full dealer history up to 2014 but after that it appears to have fallen into some relatively inexperienced hands. With decidedly suspect lowering springs fitted, the ride is woeful. The brakes have been shockingly “refurbished” and by that I mean hand painted yellow and Porsche stickers re-applied wonky and on 2 calipers upside down!
Tyres are all odd with the most budget of them all named “Achilles” officially making the tyres this car’s weak spot.
Originally this car was black and at some point has been wrapped in the white we see here. It’s actually been done rather well but clashes somewhat with the tan interior.
On the plus side it has a fairly decent exhaust system fitted and the Turbo alloys are nicer than the factory 2.5s. It’s had clear lenses fitted which I’m a fan of and before the car reached me it also had a new hood fitted.
The Plan
Over the coming months the plan is to develop a suite of upgrades and modifications that we can repeat easily within a given budget. We’ll take the car to the track and test our work with a long term goal of having a package or 2 that we can apply to future Boxsters which could potentially allow customers easy access to a well prepared track car which ultimately can transition into a fully fledged race car with just a minimal amount of extra work.
We might even fit in a bit of racing ourselves. (Purely for experimental purposes of course)
Step 1
First things first, sorting the brakes and suspension. Given that we’re on a budget there was no call made to Ohlins or even Powerflex for that matter. At least not yet! Some decent brake pads and discs along with a quick refurb of the calipers along with some braided lines and decent fluid was the first task. While the brakes were off though we decided to change out the tired shocks and Chinese springs and install some H&R coilovers. These are very much entry level coilovers but a good starting point and a big leap forward from where the car was previously.
Ideally we’d uprate the anti roll bars and fit poly bushes all round but for now this is our base point.
While all this was happening the wheels were treated to a new set of Yokohama AD08Rs.
Along the way various additional parts were replaced as and when they were found to be past their best or indeed siezed beyond saving. Suspension top mount was a case in point. One side had been replaced fairly recently but the other side was falling apart.
Brake pads are Ferodo DS2500 which are tried and tested by us on various track cars. they should be up to the job.
The brakes look 100% better than they were but they are not perfect. Ideally we would have sent them away for a proper refresh but again, for our purposes this will do for now.
