Today I felt like a kid waiting for Christmas as the UPS man arrived for our daily drop off. Our new Status Racing Ring GT seats arrived for our Porsche, and I must admit I was highly impressed with them. We opted for the Ring GT seat in a black carbon fiber with black alcantara covering for this application to tie in with the black carbon interior package in our car. The attention to detail on these seats is unbelievable, the weave is perfect, the covering has no wrinkles, and they even include a billet etched serial plate on the seats. These seats are available in a FRP, Carbon, or Carbon Kevlar finish and have covering options available in cloth,suede, and leather in a wide variety of colors. Most seats can be turned around in 2 weeks of less, a very impressive feat given the high standards of quality Status strives to achieve. Like many of their products, these seats meat FIA safety requirements and are acceptable in most racing organizations.

The factory Porsche seats with hardware weighed in at a hefty 60lbs each including hardware. Our new Ring GT’s without hardware weighed in at 21lbs! Even with the brackets and sliders mounted on the seat we still should be looking at a 65-70lb savings for the pair. It’s hard to argue with a great looking, comfortable seat made from quality products that saves so much weight. We’ve been in talks with Status since we first saw their high quality products at SEMA, and are proud to be one of their main East coast distribution points. If you’re in the market for a custom seat or set of quality harnesses, give one of our sales reps a call or email and they’ll make sure you’re covered.

After a few busy weeks we finally got a chance to get Project 996tt on the dyno for some initial tuning with our new K24/18G+ kit. After a few busy weeks in the shop working on customers cars and a short weight for a few final missing parts we strapped her on our in-house dynojet in RWD format to begin tuning and get some power to the ground.

We’ve slowly been turning up the boost on the car and dialing in the tune with the help of Tony Chick from EPL’s using their new dealer flash tool. The flashing has been flawless and the process of uploading a new file to the car takes mere minutes. We’ve seen great results so far at lower boost levels and will be turning the boost up a couple ticks in the next week or two to get even more power out of the setup. Using our new fuel system is working great and ad 1.31 bar we where only at 55% duty cycle on the injectors, so we have plenty of room to go for more boost, we’ll likely stop at 1.4-1.5bar on race fuel as this should be a good point for hard usage on the stock engine.

First Pass on low boost (1.15 bar):

60′ 1.729
330 4.889
1/8 7.404
MPH 100.83
1000 9.535
1/4 11.293
MPH 126.79

Second Pass with a bit more boost (1.31 bar)

60′ 1.882
330 4.957
1/8 7.306
MPH 105.99
1000 9.344
1/4 11.051
MPH 130.34

We’ll be doing a bit more tuning this week, hopefully turning the wick up for a bit more power. Chris Green @ USP Motorsports is sending a set of his intercoolers for us to use on the car, that should help keep the intake temperatures down as the boost gets turned up. Now that we’ve gone quicker than 11.5X twice, the track has also requested we install a roll bar. We’re going to take some time to install our GMG cage and new Status seats and try to get rid of some more dead weight in the interior. Progress is always a good thing and with a near 10 second pass on only our 2nd pass, I’m quite happy with where we’re heading.