Car appreciation... the aesthetics, the engineering, etc

A little update on the 911 engine project. We've been making a lot of use of CAD and 3-D printing to make test parts, allowing us to fit E46 M3 ITB's to the M96 engine. We're going with dual DBW actuators, one for each bank of ITB's, each bank fed from the GT3-RS plenum with dual resonance flaps, itself fed from the cup airbox. This will require fairly sophisticated engine management as there will be 6 throttle butterflies and two variable length intake butterflies to be controlled at each rev/load/speed condition.

We're sticking with VarioCam (two stage timing change), rather than VarioCam+ (infinitely variable timing and variable lift on the intake cam), and using much more lift and duration than Porsche intended (hence the rather lovely box of valves that just arrived, as we need more lift from a smaller base-circle). We've gone for larger valves at the same time as longer valve stems, more for port geometry reasons than increased diameter.

Which of course means that we have to update the tappet chest geometry:

But it's a mix of early and late systems, and tuning everything to get the most from it and so everything plays well together is going to be key. We'll be running a Syvecs S8 system.

We also need it to hold together, so we're addressing the same issues that Porsche had to with the X51 powerkit, again adding complexity (but hopefully mitigating risk).

Will it work? Who knows! I'm hoping that even if we only end up with the output of a 996.1 GT3 we'll gain in throttle response and tractability, combining as we are VarioCam and VarioRam (as it were).