996RS - Could it be the next Singer?

No doubt we are all amazed at what Singer, Gunther Werks and others have done to the 964 and 993 market. Their exquisite restomods, combined with a dwindling number of donor cars, have pushed their desirability through the roof. So I ask myself, is it time for the 996 now to ascend to the throne? RPM Tecnik in the UK tried it about 6-7 years ago with their 996CSR series cars, only to shelve the program and move onto more profitable business. Fast forward to 2026 and Slakker Racing in the USA is cranking out 4.1L engine rebuilds for the 996. Can this be the foundation for a "996 RS" project? I am creating this build thread, which may or may not turn into something larger, as I approach my 60th birthday in a few days and reminisce about the cars I enjoyed driving the most. Chapter 1 - The Start: I was still in my mid-20s when Porsche introduced the 964 and in my mind, the RS America is the one I should have bought when prices bottomed out in the mid-$40s after the 2009 financial crisis. Instead I bought the Ferrari 355 Berlinetta shown in my profile picture. Now fast forward many cars and many years later. 8 years ago (2018) I sold my 997.2 GT3 here on Rennlist. I loved what the car stood for, but frankly the heavy clutch and the refinement of most modern Porsches left me and the GT3 at odds with each other. Chapter 2 to follow in my next post.

Chapter 2 - It's January 2024 and I've just finished building my dream C5 Corvette track car, a 2004 Le Mans Edition Z06. I started looking for a clean 996.2 Carrera 2 for my "996RS" project and found one at a Porsche dealership near my old office in Philly. It had a decent amount of work invested in it from the Porsche dealer after they took it in on a trade, but after I purchased it and brought it to the PCA recommended shop in Malvern PA (Performance Automotive) to get it ready for a drive across the country, they told me the Need to Do It list was longer than I thought. At that point, a reasonable person would simply get the car cleaned up and flip it. But something about the intimate dimensions of the 996 interior, the engine's character as the Variocam hits the "Vtech Yo" point, and the Metropol blue interior with sport seats glued this car to my heart. The guys at Performance Automotive did a great job of handling the heavy lifting so I could get this car on a transporter back to my home in Southern California before the next snowstorm. In short, they installed an LN IMS, spin-on oil filter adapter, changed the clutch, PP and TO bearing, installed a new RMS and AOS, new clutch slave and other ancillary parts, and fresh set of plugs. Then it went on a ride across the country and arrived at my house on a rainy weekday a month later.

Chapter 3 - Spring & Summer 2024. I consider myself lucky to have a tall ceiling in the garage. We did not have that at our old house. I have a 4-post lift in 1 bay of our 2-car garage and a high lift garage door. This allowed me to knock out some of the simpler projects once the car arrived in SoCal. I refreshed the springs and shocks with the Bilstein B8 and Eibach Pro Kit and did new upper mounts and bump stops at the same time. Big improvement with some unexpected tradeoffs (more on that in a minute.) Front & rear pads and rotors. New front lower control arms. New wheel bearings. A few jobs like pressing in the bearings and removing the 20+ year old struts from the front uprights were graciously handled by Schneider Autohaus nearby in Santa Barbara, California. Normally repair garages don't want to touch take-off parts that you bring through their front door. But Henry and Paula the owners of Schneider's were already servicing the P-cars of several of my friends, so they were happy to help, and would continue to do so for the next 2 years. I drove the car for the rest of the year on its stock Turbo Twists, filling out the fenders with 7mm spacers in the front and 12mm spacers in the rear. It looked and drove pretty good, but a few niggling issues continued to bother me. 1) The Eibach Pro-Kit lowered the car too much, leaving the front and rear control arms positioned above the horizontal plane. As many of you already know, lowered 996s are an exercise in alignment spec compromises without additional mods. And I was not ready to sink more money into the car yet. Short version of the story: Less than optimal camber in the front, and camber and toe in the rear, using all of the factory alignment range available. Driving in a straight line or at 60-70% in a canyon, it was never noticeable. Pushed hard like my Z06 track car (or the NC2 Miata track car not shown in the pictures) and the 996 exhibited a fair amount of bump steer and tail wagging. 2) The paint and interior leather were decent, but there were noticeable blemishes. I took care of the interior with a leather dye kit. The paint would have to wait until 2025's budget allocation.

Chapter 4 - 2025, Another year of credit card points earned on 996 related purchases. In the spring Ed Palmer of Kundensport in Santa Paula executed a brilliant job of color matching the factory paint. He resprayed the front and rear bumper, rear quarter panels, and an annoying bird **** stain on the rear c-pillar. He also installed the radiator grill guards on the freshly painted bumper. After that the car went to Ghost Shield for Xpel clear film on the nose, 1/2 fenders, hood and mirrors. I added the front GT3 lip and spent a little for the Rennline carbon fiber rear lip spoiler. I bought a set of Apex SM-10 wheels (18x9 fronts, 18x11 rears) and upgraded to GT3 tire sizes, aka +10mm in width both front and rear. Inside the car, Car Audio Innovations in Sacramento put in a new single DIN Pioneer Bluetooth radio/CD player and an external amp. Meanwhile Scheider knocked out another list of maintenance items: New water pump & thermostat, AC service, and installed a Numeric short shifter and their upgraded shift cables. I drove the car up to Monterey Car week in the fall and made it to Werks Reunion, as well as a full-day charity rally benefitting the local Boys and Girls Club. The car drives wonderfully at 60-70%....so I mentally prepared myself for another "capital call" funding round in 2026. I am purposely giving a shout out to all the great service facilities that did the work on the car. All of them advertise in their regional PCA newsletter and do fantastic work, allowing me to focus on my job and family instead of turning my own wrenches every weekend. On the Boys & Girls Club Rally4Kids. The Eibach Pro Kit lowered the rear of the car excessively. Using all the range of the factory lower camber adjuster, I still had -2.7 degrees of negative camber per side. The rear contact patch would just get smaller as the rear suspension compressed and introduced additional negative camber. The expensive solution is in the next post.

Chapter 5 - The Holiday Sale purchases and their aftermath. Over the holidays (Christmas 2025, New Year 2026) Rennline announced that they were releasing a clone of the GT3 lower control arms. As most of you know, the factory GT3 control arm use shims to adjust camber, and has a two-position drumstick arm mounting bushing in the front to adjust caster. Rennline had these on a new product special so I bought 4 of them, plus the rear adjustable toe links, and their front bump steer kit. Then I went over to FCP Euro and bought the rest of the upper, lower and trailing arms, plus new sway bar end links needed for a full control arm/bushing swap. I needed to fix that rear ride height and put some rake back in the car to regain rear bump travel. Prothane has a 2-inch diameter urethane spring spacer that is perfect for raising the ride height up by 12mm. Then another holiday sale email landed in my mailbox. LN Engineering had a sale on their plus-two quart deep sump oil pan kit with the X51 baffle and the sump guard. Bought that too. A few weeks ago, an unobtainium set of 996 GT3 factory wheels came up for sale in the Rennlist classifieds, so I grabbed those too. And Continental was offering a $100 rebate on a new set of 4 tires, so it was off to America's Tire to pick up some Extreme Contact Force 02 tires. I've been traveling extensively for work so I just dropped the car off at Scheider Autohaus again with a bunch of parts in the frunk, added a few extra service items (front caliper rebuild and new hoses), and picked it up a few weeks later. After the GT3 wheels went on, the car's look, stance and handling were really transformed in a good way. And the deep sump is a game changer. More information on that in the next post. Note the extra stack height of the LN/Bilt 2qt Deep Sump. I bought their skid plate as part of the Holiday shopping spree. Another good reason to raise the rear ride height a bit.

Chapter 6 - Summer 2026 and planning for 2027. (No pictures yet.) I've driven the car twice since after installing the full F/R GT3 control arm set and the new aftermarket arms to replace the ones I did not service back in 2024. After raising the rear ride height to introduce rake, and realigning the car to slightly more aggressive settings than a stock GT3, the car is settled in both low and higher speed corners, and under trail braking/corner entry. I have the good fortune to live in North Ventura County (SoCal) about 20 minutes away from the Southern tip of the Los Padres National Forest. There are great roads here to shake down the car. I'll continue to work on it in preparation for a 2-day test/tune date in December at Laguna Seca that I am signed up for. The LN/Bilt Racing +2Qt Deep Sump Kit Notes: IMO, this should have been an option on the original 996 Carrera build sheet. Even the rare X51 Powerkit option does not have the extra 2 quarts of oil capacity. My first choice was the Hartech baffled deep sump but that is nearly 2.5x or 3x the price of this kit. I have not done any delta T data logging with the Bilt deep sump, but my subjective observation is that water temps rarely budge above 180F on the dash gauge now, even when running the car on the back roads around 4-5000 rpm to stay in the fat part of the torque curve. For reference, I still run a 180 thermostat and never went down to a 160. This in turn appears to preserve ignition timing, meaning the ignition timing is not retarding as aggressively as before on California 91 octane. Leading up to my August trip up to Werks Reunion and December 2025 Laguna Seca testing, I just have a few remaining items to sort out: 1) I have an H&R 26mm solid front anti-roll bar and Eibach 22mm rear bar to install. I need to order some adjustable drop links for the rear. 2) I need to add some negative camber to the front. 3) I have a Rennkit HVAC blend door "tape kit" that I need to install. Moving onto the 2027 budget, it's time to do a proper job on the interior. New power window regulators/motors, some leather recovering (I use Chuy's auto interiors in Carson, CA near PEC Los Angeles), and a steering wheel replacement. I tackled the HVAC screen and head unit replacement already, so the last item on my interior checklist in the rear seat removal and GT3 carpet kit. I plan to let Chuy's handle the carpet to color match the slightly faded Metropol blue factory carpet. Depending on the budget dollars, it may also be time to grab a factory front Aerokit bumper from Suncoast, a set of Aerokit side skirts, and a duck tail trunk lid from Design911. That will just leave the 4.1 motor conversion, something I think I can hold off on for a few years.

Congrats in the car. As a 996 enthusiast, I appreciate when an owner takes the time to refresh one. Two additional items I would consider. 1. Upgrade your factory AOS to the UAOS w/track drain. The factory AOS is a weak link which has a difficult time processing 8.5 quarts if oil. Forget about 10.5 witg a 2 qt deep sump. The UAOS T will allow you to not only process the extra 2 qts from the deep sump, but if tiu don't have "blow-by" issues (see Blow By thread), you can overfill the oil an additional 2 qts above the 10.5 witg the deep sump. As an example. I run 12.5 qts of oil in my 3.6. Propetly solves for oil pressure instability and oil starvation on the track. Not to mention eliminates the oil plumes and risk of hydrolock amd intermix through the AOS. 2. Look for @Coopduc thread on his digital oil temp gauge. It will give you a true read of oil temps which are more accurate than the water temp gauge. Plenty more to talk about, but i am looking forward to more posts on your journey.

I'm sure if you gave Singer a million, they would make you bespoke 996.

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I appreciate the information on the upgraded air oil separator, and the digital oil temp gauge. I like to pull my data right from the OBD2 port. I use OBDLink right now but I have to check if it works on older Porsches.

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Unless you are able to run Durametric software on a device, you wont be able to get oil temps from the OBD. Hence the Digital gauge many of us are using from @Coopduc . For sure, you can run a more elaborate system like AIM or others for racing. But they arent OBD.

Can we get a part number for that Prothane spring spacer? I'm having the same issue with my rear Eibach Springs being too low.

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Energy Suspension 9.6117 from Suspension.com will work on the Bilstein B8 rear shocks. Add the factory black colored upper spring spacer to get a few extra mm. of ride height. I wrote Prothane in the early post, but Energy is actually the brand I used from this seller.