Porsche 997 GT3

Tony felt that a drive from Las Vegas to our shop in the Sacramento area (Roseville), would be worthwhile.

He really wanted us to work on his beautiful pristine GT3.  This meant about an 8 hour drive.  (In a normal car.)  He took the time to visit local friends, some travel, then he'd pick it up a week or so later and drive it back home.  buddy.

This is what Tony's car looked like when we removed some stuff.  The rollbar is by far the most time-consuming portion of R&R time required to pull seats, console, carpet.  yeah.....that rollbar.  Coming out was tight and tricky, reinstallation was complicated by the actual mounts not lining up 100% with the mounting locations in the car.(!)

Here we see the beautiful crouching 911 GT3 with two nice, but somewhat docile 911's, when compared to the, well, the sheer magic, of the GT3.

So, what were we doing in here? 'Lots of dampening mat. This car is made really lightweight, and Tony definitely tracks this car, but he also wants to be able to drive to places like, well, Northern California, the International Headquarters (and sole location) of Car Audio Innovations, Inc., without having a punishing ride.  (The ride home should be much better.)  Excessive/continuous road noise (as well as wind and engine noise) will cause fatigue, wearing us down without us always being aware of it. 

 We installed Roadkill high performance dampening mat all over the steel "tub" in the rear, effectively the "firewall" on such a car.  We also used some lightweight Roadkill Overkill, which is a 1/2" thick adhesive backed mat of a foam rubber-type compound.  I know the car was still plenty loud when I test drove it, but hopefully it's much more tolerable on freeway or highway for sustained periods. 

('sorry, no "after" shot of the dampening mat.  We had lots of work to do and rarely pause to take pictures of most of the cars we work on.  Since we see 100-125 cars per month, even the nice, fun, big jobs don't always lend themselves to a "photo op" unless some finds the time to stop and snap some pics at various points.  We try to grab more of the notable ones, but we see 5-10 Porsches each month-they're all nice cars and many of them receive a comprehensive sound upgrade-doh!)

Here's what most of these Porsches look like when you remove some of the electronics and interior.

This is like an "after" shot, showing the nice compact, relatively lightweight Kenwood Excelon Reference Fit XR4S amplifier.   Clean sounding with absolutely no noise in the system.  Everyone got involved with this job, Tony, Carl and Charlie all spent time in this baby.  I might have pointed at this or that, 'mostly a nuisance while they worked.  I was part of the tag team required to remove and reinstall the roll bar.   Yowza.

I managed to get absolutely no pictures of the new Kenwood double din Excelon DDX896 touchscreen (I run the same in my 996 C2, no nav but just like Kenwood's flagship DNX9960 in every other regard-Rod) with a Kenwood stout 4 channel amplifier and new Hertz 3-way HSK components in the factory dash and door speaker locations, Hertz coaxial speakers in stock rear locations, Sirius Satellite radio, handsfree bluetooth (not always useful in this car!), Ipod integration with a nice Porsche crest and logo on a white background every time he starts the car.  The system looks exactly as it did before he brought it to us with a slightly different looking headunit, but all speaker grills unchanged, the amp hidden in the factory amp location under the passenger seat. The car really looks the same, but sounds 1 million times better.  We get even better results in most of the 996's and 997's we install systems in, utilizing a 5 or 6 channel amp and adding our "tight bass" subwoofer package.  Again, all oem in appearance, but millions of times better sounding, even at freeway speeds with windows down!

 

Thank you Tony (and your lady) for making the drive up, you guys are super cool and I was delighted to bust out the Otter Pops when you guys met me at the shop. 

good times, 'hope you enjoy your new setup and slightly quieter car now!

(Porsche, Porsche 911, and 911 are all trademarks of Porsche Cars North America, no affiliation or endorsement is intended)