鈥淥f Endurance Racing Fame?
My son鈥檚 Porsche suffered a rather dramatic front axle failure while undergoing some high-speed, high-stress testing in our living room. Just look at the damage. My wife and I, and Graham as well, are just lucky he was able to walk away unscathed. Our wallet, however, had to bear the brunt of the damage as we attempted a repair. Looking at the damaged parts in detail I was surprised to see that the front axle was made up of uni-directional pine, milled to less than 1MM diameter. This seemed like a feathery piece of engineering, one I wondered if had been superseded by a new factory part. Calling the factory in Stuttgart, I was soon forwarded to a member of the competition engineering department. A Dr. Peter Wolfhensler. He was well aware of the front axle failure on my son鈥檚 Porsche. 鈥淯nfortunately, the pine used for that production run had some core instabilities that showed up under extensive testing.
We ourselves experienced a dramatic failure while testing on the Nurburgring. The right front wheel shearing off and the driver being slammed into the Armco at 200 kmh. But overall, we are still pleased with the performance of this equipment. I asked if they had fixed the problem. Here the doctor paused, 鈥淣ot quite. We are still looking for a suitable pine-based axle assembly as it has the desired weight/cost/performance ratio but have not found an adequate solution. Carbon fiber seemed like a good material for this use, so I asked Dr. Wolfhensler about that as an option. 鈥淚t is too costly for a customer car. We have learned our lessons from ceramic brakes. About to hang up the phone, Dr. Wolfhensler tossed another option at me. 鈥淥f endurance racing fame? 鈥淵es, of course. I hear that TRG is developing a fix that uses a ferrous material. They have found the additional weight is not a handicap in their particular type of racing.
So once again, when it comes to my Porsches, I had to turn to a private entity to find a satisfactory repair. The LN engineering fix for the M96 IMS comes to mind. I quickly rang up TRG. I didn鈥檛 even fully explain the problem when the young man on the other end of the line interrupted me. 鈥淚 know the exact problem. 鈥淚鈥檒l take it.鈥?I said. Gulping after the young man quoted me the price, I took a breath and was hit with more bad news. 鈥淵ou are handy right? The kit comes as a you-cut-to-fit and epoxy yourself kit. This allows you to change the track of the car if you wish. The kit arrived and I set to work. First, I had to re-bore the wheels. Thanks Porsche for using an adhesive instead of a center-lock. I used a 1/4 inch bit and made sure to hone it perfectly true. I don鈥檛 want my son to suffer any high-speed vibrations. Next, I leave some things as the factory intended and did not alter the track. I used the stock width of 11.5mm. And with no other alternative, I also used a quick-setting, multi-material epoxy. The fellows at TRG suggesting I ensure thorough coating of the parts because if their steel comes into contact with the wood wheels there would be galvanic corrosion due to minute metal particles in the wood stock. So, did Graham notice any difference in the ride quality of his Porsche after my lengthy repairs? In a word, no. He just grabbed it and pushed it along the floor - on its roof. Of course the above is fiction. It is the way I handle how poorly this toy was built in the first place. Kinda like Boxster motors.
The average number of times the vehicle is brought into the shop for unscheduled repairs and maintenance in a single year. This metric is calculated by tracking millions of unique vehicles over multiple years to determine an average number of visits per year for each make and model. Controls were included to omit small routine visits to shops such as for oil changes. The severity component to reliability measures the probability that a repair will be a major issue. An issue is considered severe if a repair requires immediate service, is prohibitively expensive, or presents a situation that is potentially dangerous or damaging. RepairPal combines multiple disparate data sets to identify and flag these issues and then rates the severity component for each vehicle relative to that of other models in our database. The probability of a repair being a severe or major issue is 17% for the Porsche Cayenne, compared to an average of 9% for luxury midsize SUVs and 11% for all vehicle models.