Tony Mcguiness
In 2014 I sold my 997.2 Turbo and bought a brandnew 2015 991.1
GT3. If you have been reading my
LTL columns for a few years, you may recall in one issue I detailed a problem that had been occurring with my GT3: frequently on start-up, it would blow out a huge plume of smoke. There wasn’t any particular time of the day this happened. It could happen on a cold start in my garage, or if I had driven for three hours and parked it for an hour. Even if I went back to the car while the engine was relatively warm, it would still blow out a massive plume.
As owners know, the GT3 and the
GT3 RS are known for the occasional small puff of smoke on start-up. It’s almost a badge of honour when you fire that engine up and the result is a puff of smoke from those two centre pipes.
To take a step back for a minute, when the 2014 Model Year 991.1 GT3 debuted, it didn’t get off to the most auspicious start. It wasn’t long before it was being reported that several 991.1 GT3 engines had caught fire. Porsche recalled the hundreds sold and replaced all 2014 GT3 models with brand-new engines.
Fast-forward to 30 December 2014, I purchased a new Model Year 2015 GT3, which I knew did not come with the same motor as the 2014 Model Year. It wasn’t long into ownership that I started noticing smoke appear in my rear-view mirror on start-up. At the time, I wasn’t overly concerned because I thought perhaps it was a one-off event.
However, later that day as I was leaving a car event, I asked my friend Blake to take a video of my exhaust as I started the GT3. Fortunately, he was there to record it as a huge cloud of white and blue and then black smoke bellowed out of the pipes.
The next day I took the GT3 back to the Porsche dealership and showed them the video. They couldn’t get the
911 to repeat any smoking. It was really like going to the dentist with a toothache that goes away when you get there. The GT3 would not smoke for them. They recommended that whenever possible, I video every start-up to see if it happens again. In the meantime, I received a letter from Porsche as I believe all 991.1 GT3 owners received, indicating that they were extending the warranty of my GT3 engine for ten years past the standard four-year warranty or up to 120,000 total miles. This letter gave me great satisfaction and allowed me to not get stressed. Now I had it in writing that if something did go wrong, Porsche would replace my engine with a brand-new one. Or would they?
It wasn’t long before it again began smoking on start-up. As recommended, I took video of the start-ups at different angles compiling quite the number of videos documenting how big the plume of smoke could get and how it would sometimes be different colours. Disturbingly, an occasional popping could be heard for the duration of the start-up until I began driving the car.
In February, I took the GT3 and all the videos I’d compiled down to the dealer so they could begin a deep investigation into the engine. What I learnt was fascinating. Next month I will share the results of their investigation that went quite high up internally with Porsche.