SONIC BOOM BOY

In an unplanned attempt to emulate Bloodhound’s world land speed record challenge, Johnny Tipler discovers his 986 S is halfway to the sound barrier with a Cargraphic silencer, which provides the required acoustic effect

With hurricanes and tidal surges in the news of late, my newly acquired 986 Boxster S has gone along with the flow and adopted a new soundtrack – a rushing tsunami tune that, under hard acceleration at high revs, conjures up nothing so much as a fast-moving tidal wave. All credit, then, to Cargraphic for bringing about the transformation from babbling brook-style choppy sea to full on surf-smacker surge.

A day on the hoist at Cargraphic’s Cullompton, Devon, factory saw the standard 986 box replaced by a gorgeous shiny ovoid cylinder. If that sounds like a straightforward job, hear this: with the car up on the ramp, first action is when Keith, a veteran exhaust specialist, cuts the brackets off the old pipes connecting the silencer so it can be demounted. He removes the car’s rear bumper panel and raised the spoiler to gain better access via the engine bay to undo the captive nuts to the silencer support. ‘There’s no way of getting your hands or a tool on the other side of the nut to prevent it from spinning, so the only option is to remove the rear valance, and the job is made far easier by doing that, once we’d figured out how to lift the spoiler.’

It’s evident that on the bolts holding the manifold in place, especially on the left-hand side, the corners of the nuts have rusted away. We’ll tackle those in a future report, no doubt, but they give a clue of the chore in store. Meanwhile, Keith had the devil’s own job getting the pipe with the cat on, because the triangular flanges were corroded together, and it’s very difficult to separate them without applying heat, particularly as he’s remounting it onto an existing plate; if he was replacing everything he wouldn’t have to be too careful about how he removed it – he would just hit it or cut it. ‘You just don’t know how long it’s going to take to get the old stuff off,’ says Keith; ‘and when you go into a high street exhaust place, they tend to just cut it, they use gas, they use grinders, with no thought of having to fit back onto something that’s already there.’ After that, the job becomes more straightforward, though Keith needs a second pair of hands when reconnecting cat pipe to silencer, itself supported on a tripod stand. It makes an incredible difference having one fitted at source.

Cargraphic partner Simon Young is optimistic: ‘You should have more sound, and probably a marginal horsepower gain. It’s slightly lighter than the original as well, and hopefully you’re looking at 3- to 5bhp more, which might be noticeable, but definitely more sound, and it’s a nice looking piece of kit as well; it’s quite unique, because it’s not made from pressings like the standard one, and the ends on our silencer are like half a rugby ball on each end, and that gives the silencer a very distinguished look. And it doesn’t resonate, which is another good thing.’ I like the rugger ball analogy, though I’ll need to be careful when I park at the rugby club, then – you know those rugger buggers, any excuse to handle a ball… Anyway, it is interesting to learn how the shape of the silencer came about: ‘the company we buy our baffles from are restricted on what they can offer us in the way of ones for a large oval silencer, and there was nothing really that we could buy off the shelf that was big enough for what we wanted, so we decided to make our own tooling and produce our own end sections for this particular size, with a view to using it on other systems, and we maximised the space available in terms of the silencer unit and the back end of the car. When we were originally doing this, back in the late ’90s, of the systems that were available for the Boxster at the time there was nothing that was particularly good, and everything tended to resonate. So we produced all this tooling to fabricate the rugby ball silencers, and it’s a unique product for the 986. The advantage of doing something like this is that it makes it hard for somebody to copy it if they’re not prepared to invest in the sort of tooling that we’ve invested in. It’s a totally different system on a 987, a different layout, different system. What you’ve got here only works on a 986, and we’ve produced it in such a way that the 2.5 and the 3.2 S both use the same silencer but they have a different hanging system. We produce the hangers on brackets so you can take the same silencer and you either fit a set of 2.5 brackets or a set of 3.2 S brackets. I wouldn’t say the 987 system is better than the 986, it’s just different.’

‘The 981 Boxster is different again, though the original system is surprisingly light, so there must be less requirement for silencing, and that must be due to the

engine configuration I guess. But the rear section of the 981 is quite a good system anyway, and we make a flap system for them, and we do a full race system for all of the 987s and 981s, and there’s quite a comprehensive range of parts for both those models. Not so much for the 986. I think the 986 will recover in value, and as soon as there is a resurgence people will start spending money on them and we’ll start selling systems again. I don’t see Boxsters getting any cheaper than they are now, so there is only one way for them and that will be up.’

I’ll drink to that. I start up the engine and instantly the Cargraphic rugby ball elicits a much deeper rumbling on tick-over. On the A38 the sound crescendos to a mellow boom, and nothing like the rasp that characterised the 996. I notice that there’s slightly better torque and now I can pull more strongly from lower revs, with slightly perkier acceleration as well. It makes me want to have the rest of the Cargraphic system installed now.

You can’t beat a Boxster point to point, cross country. Especially when it’s been lowered a bit. Having had the suspension slammed by 10mm with M030 springs, supplied by Porscheshop and fitted by SCS at Honiton, the next revision to the running gear was to fit the 18in five-spoke Carrera wheels left over from the 996. As mentioned in my last running report, they were fairly corroded on their inner surfaces so I got Colorcote at Hethel to powder-coat them a bluey-grey hue. What I hadn’t appreciated was that, at the back, the 996 version of the Carrera wheels were 10in rims while those on the Boxster were 9in. We discovered this only when the boys at Kingsway Tyres in Norwich fitted a set of Vredestein Ultrac-vorti tyres, balanced the gorgeous as-new wheels and fitted them on the car and, much to our surprise, we found it wouldn’t budge. The rear rims were jammed against the rear dampers. A call to Porscheshop elicited a set of 10mm spacers. The rear wheels still rubbed. A pair of 20mm spacers followed. The rims were clear of the dampers, but the standard bolts securing the spacers to the hubs were too long, and sounded as if they were snagging on the handbrake spring in the nearside hub when the wheel was rotated. So Porscheshop sent a set of shortened (by 2mm) bolts, and finally, on the fifth attempt, the wheels went on and didn’t catch on anything. They endow the 986 with a great deal more attitude, and I think the darker colour sets off the Arctic Silver of the bodywork very nicely. I ran into an old acquaintance, Rick Cannell of Highgate House Graphics, at the recent Classics at the Castle gathering, and he proposed a decorative programme for the car, though he wouldn’t be drawn on what he has in mind. Anyway, at first I wasn’t so sure about the ride quality with the new, lower profile tyre walls, which produced a harsher, less compliant ride, and I felt an element of the tactile feel of tyre-on-tarmac had also been lost. So, it is tempting, then, to source a set of 17in wheels and undertake similar cosmetic treatment as the Carrera wheels, and shoe them with appropriately taller rubber. It would be interesting to see how the 986 looks with Fuchs wheels, which would perhaps be more in keeping with the purer classic shape of the original Boxster. When it comes to roadholding, though, the Vredesteins are imperious in their adhesion, making the Boxster feel utterly planted on a smooth surface; sure, there’s not so much pleasure on a rustic country lane because of the uncompromising ride, but I guess that goes with the territory. At any rate, grip is phenomenal, and there’s a new poise about the Boxster as it goes around corners, evoking that feeling that you can simply do anything you want with it. You can’t ask much more of a car than that. Other than a smoother ride, perhaps.

And, meanwhile, as that thought festers away in my mind, I’ve planned a road trip to Northern France, opting for overnight crossings aboard Brittany Ferries’ finest, so let’s hope the good folk of Brittany aren’t alarmed by the tsunami soundtrack emitted by their cheeky visitor. PW