Jad wrote:What it comes down to is personal taste. There is no 'right' answer.
Great post Jad. That about covers it, so pardon me if I expand on on some of your points.
If you are in a learning curve it is difficult to know what class or what organization you may want to race with 3 years from now. It helps having a car that is legal in all of them.
Buy all the Porsche you can. It is cheaper than doing it yourself.
Think safety and consider well prepped track cars, suspensions, brake systems, full cages, fire systems, race seats. Buying a used race car is very risky, from build quality, or off track damage to just being simply worn out. If you find a west coast PCA Club racer you can do a little detective work and minimize your risk. Consider too how peaked is the drive train, for example the factory cup cars are awesome but may require frequent expensive servicing. A car with recent proven lap times is good.
I am totally 911 biased. The 944 spec idea is valid, though if you are a quick study you may soon be searching for more car. Hats off to the guys that enjoy this competition saving $$ and concentrating more importantly on driver improvement.
Jad's turbo 944 is nice I used to have an 86. I also like Mike Van Zandt's 944 turbo track car.
I just had to have a little more Porsche 911.
With minimal experience your skills could develop into something like Jack Miller’s track 964 club race/TT car. Race it and keep it streetble with 3.6 power. What are those going for? I might talk myself into it.
For the money the fastest car in town might be Chris Burns POC race car which runs 1.23s at Big Willow, maybe 65K? A lot of car for anyone!
My experience…I bought an AM class street legal 911 a couple of years ago and it was all the 911 I wanted for 3 years. But now I was ready for a little more. Although after 3 years no specific race class interested me.
Having a competitive class specific car to race with more than one organization is difficult because rarely are class specifics the same in the various race organizations. I do enjoy racing with various race organizations and in these races with multiple classes you can normally find a car/driver of similar performance to race. Bottom line I do not race exclusively with PCA so I choose to build a 911 to my own specs.
End of last season I began to consider higher performance track/street legal options. Street legal because imho it just seems more useful if on occasion I can cruise it locally instead of having to tow it to the track to drive it. I could have sold my AM class 911 and bought a more developed 911. But chances are whatever I bought would have needed something, and my field was narrow as I preferred a street legal pre 75 911.
I enjoy early 911s and desired a dual purpose street/track car built to high performance specs. The option that best suited me was to have Jae at Mirage International develop my street legal AM 911 into a radical RSR+.
An RSR+ should suit me well at SDR PCA AR class time trails, Club races with PCA, Alfa Club, TCRA, and an occasional DE. Perhaps a couple PCA or R Gruppe mountain tours too.
Deciding what you want can be the toughest part.