Yahoo Autos The End of a Watercooled Love Affair
It started the way a lot of great relationships do: with indifference bordering on contempt. We met in the spring of 2005, the SCCA National Solo autocross season just around the corner. My 1995 Porsche 911 was, in my opinion, getting just a bit too old and fragile to be used for National-level competition. I wanted to replace it with a new 2005 Boxster S. But the SCCA had just issued a ruling that made the new 987-generation Boxster uncompetitive in its class. "What I guess we need," I whined to my first wife, "is, like, a brand-new Boxster S from last year."
She found one.
Well, it wasn't brand new. It had four thousand miles on it, courtesy of a first owner who had found it so underwhelming to drive he'd traded it in for a new Ferrari after a few months. I didn't blame him. Nobody would ever call a 3.2-liter Boxster "fast." As one of the 1,953 Anniversary Edition cars from 2004, however, this had the updated induction system that would become standard with the 2005 models, plus some very expensive interior and exterior options. Color was (Carrera) GT Silver with a Cocoa full leather interior.
Compared to the all-new '05 car, it was a real sled, with the ugly fried-egg headlamps and a silhouette that was basically identical to the 1997 2.5-liter cars already stinking up the buy-here-pay-here lots at the time. But it was eligible for SCCA A-Stock, and the new car wasn't. And there was a bit of extra good news: we saved so much money buying slightly-used that I was able to keep my old aircooled 911 in the garage as well.
Still, I wasn't really excited about being the owner of a Boxster. I thought of it as a tool, nothing more.The only time I drove it was back and forth to autocrosses. As regional competitors, the silver Porsche and I made a good team, placing on or near the top step pretty much every time. At the National level, however, I lacked the discipline and obsessive nature required to truly shine. So I quit the sport and focused on wheel-to-wheel racing instead, where I did much better. Freed from its duties as cone-crushing weekend warrior, the Boxster sat in the garage gathering dust. After four years, it had just twelve thousand miles on the clock.
Out of boredom, I began taking gigs as a part-time driver coach, using the Boxster as my transport to and from the track. Polished up my tag-along autocross tire trailer. Bought a stack of Hoosiers for my three sets of spare wheels. Spent every weekend away from home at racetracks from New Hampshire to Atlanta to Chicago. Somewhere in there I managed to get divorced. I bought out my wife's share of the car. After countless late-night hauls looking down the headlight arches, cranking fusion jazz through the Bose system, sleeping at the truck stops to save money on hotels… well, the old Boxster and I were starting to click.
With oversized R-compound tires squeezed under the arches and a take-no-prisoners approach to corner entry, the 264-horsepower watercooled Porker broke a thousand hearts at trackdays across the country. It was the perfect tool to demonstrate everything from trail-braking to late passes. I never really came to love the engine, which always wheezed under load and never pulled hard enough to stay with anything faster than an E36 M3. But I did come to adore the brakes. With a set of Pagid Orange pads and the now-banned ATE Super Blue fluid, they were immune to fade.
I spent over 170 days on-track with my Boxster.
I spent over one hundred and seventy days on-track with my Boxster between 2008 and 2016. The odometer rolled through forty thousand additional miles. The little silver roadster never really gave me any mechanical trouble, possibly because I put the GT3-spec "motorsports" sump in it a week after I took delivery. There were places, like the "Boot" at Watkins Glen, where it would oil-starve for a moment, flash a bright-red warning on the little LCD display under the tach, then lay down a massive smoke screen on the way out of the corner. And it had a real appetite for oil, power-steering fluid, and oxygen sensors. But no Miata ever proved more bulletproof on-track than my much-maligned water-boxer. And although I kept expecting the IMS bearing to commit suicide in a flash of flame and blizzard of metal fragments, it never did.
Meanwhile, I'd become that most stereotypical of creatures: a kinda-single man in his late thirties with a Porsche. Scrubbed up and with a hasty swap to street-focused brake pads in the driveway immediately beforehand, the Boxster was my ally and companion for dozens of first dates. Reactions varied. I remember a voluptuous attorney who insisted on having the top down in all temperatures above freezing. A suburban mother who called it a "Porsh" no matter how many times I corrected her pronunciation. A car-savvy young theater director who knew more about the specification and production history than I did.
Five years ago, I took a thousand-mile overnight drive towards the Gulf of Mexico to spend the better part of a week with the fiery, dramatic, dark-haired object of my waking dreams. It started badly; somehow I accidentally hit the girl's '96 Taurus while I was pulling into the spot next to her, denting her door and scraping the clearbra placed on the Boxster's nose by the dealership that had sold it new. Things got better from there on out. The Porsche sat abandoned in the lot next to our rental apartment, top down, the keys lost under a couch somewhere. It rained over and over again in the evenings, hard enough to fill the footwells with water. Eventually the spell was broken. We agreed to say goodbye. She stayed and I left. The water drained. The interior dried out and shined up. A light dusting of sand formed a tiny dune in the center storage console. I could never bring myself to clean it out.
Time passed. I met a sensible but adventurous girl from New Mexico. We joined our vehicular fleets in holy matrimony. Then we added motorcycles, race cars, a Corvette, a famous Fiesta ST. Something had to give. The Boxster was sitting in a storage unit, just as lonely as it had been when I first took delivery. A buyer appeared, an energetic blonde with a taste for trackdays and a desire to try out the Porsche dream on the cheap.
By the time you read this, I'll have signed over the title to her, taken my money, and headed home. She will own the car, the trailer, sixteen Porsche OEM factory wheels in conditions ranging from "flawless" to "rat rod," eight spare Hoosiers with the stickers on, three different brake pad compounds in marked boxes, the Brey-Krause rollover bar, and the front license plate that I never mounted even after nine tickets for not doing so.
All of that is hers. This is what will remain mine: the memories of a thousand fingertip corner entries, a hundred moments where I thought I was truly in love with someone, a shelf of autocross trophies. All of this, I will keep. The great Townes van Zandt once wrote that "It don't pay to think too much / on things you leave behind." So I won't. But I will smile from time to time when I think about that silver car, the truest friend I had for a long time. I don't know how I got so attached. It doesn't matter. There doesn't have to be a reason for everything. Time passes. You keep what you can and let the rest go. This is me, then–trying to let go.
Born in Brooklyn but banished to Ohio, Jack Baruth has won races on four different kinds of bicycles and in seven different kinds of cars. Everything he writes should probably come with a trigger warning. His column, Avoidable Contact, runs twice a week.
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