A few months back we had Jake Raby and Charles Navarro visit the Porsche Club of America National Office to offer guidance on a major project with a 1999 Porsche 911. For those who do not know these two 996 gurus, Jake owns Flat Six Innovations. He has studied the M96/M97 engines from Porsche and has figured out ways to both improve performance as well as reliability. Charles owns LN Engineering and has developed solutions with Jake to improve the IMS bearing in the M96/M97 engines as well as improve engines that have suffered bore scoring and are able to be rebuilt.
Before Porsche existed as a sports car manufacturer, it was an engineering consultancy firm. That vein of the business continued even after the advent of the manufacturing era in 1948. Porsche has had a hand in the development of projects for manufacturers as diverse as Mooney aircraft to the Soviet Union’s Lada Automotive. But the three that were perhaps truest to the Porsche ethos were these.
Let’s put a disclaimer at the forefront. If you do not like 911s or are expecting to see a 914 or a 996, you might as well stop reading right now. If, however, you’re just a Porsche enthusiast and love reading about what all the buzz was about during Monterey car week, keep on reading.
