Your basic garden-variety 996 Twin Turbo borders on the absurd. Perhaps it's not the fastest car in the world in a straight line, thanks to a fairly porcine curb weight, but first gear is still mostly there to bias the destruction of friction materials toward the tires rather than the clutch. The Turbo's VDO tach is far more responsive and accurate than most, but it still lags a few hundred rpm by redline, which is there before you know it. If you drive it 300 miles, you should arrive fresh, except perhaps for a buzzing in the head from the shriek of the stock Pirellis on certain pavement surfaces.
Even more impressive than its dynamic performance, however, is the 996 Turbo's social performance. In places where a standard 996 goes nearly unnoticed, the Turbo has Presence. It announces that Somebody Has Arrived. At the same time, the car lover's code demands that this Somebody put up with many Anybodies, from the security guard to wide-eyed teenagers, asking questions about what the maintenance is like and how fast it's gone, or asserting that the Turbo is by far the coolest car in the world. Somebody's friends will form a line for rides. They aren't so much in it for the roller-coaster effect as to tell their friends what they did last weekend. A 996 Turbo is not for introverts.
Based in West Los Angeles, By Design caters to those who seem to feel called in life to Arrive. Its efforts have appeared in these pages increasingly frequently in recent years. This time, it's a 2002 996 Twin Turbo.
A standard element in any Porsche tuner's repertoire, even those who run at Le Mans, is the substitution of higher-level factory parts than those a car came with. By Design combined the factory Porsche GT2 front bumper and rear spoiler with Techart sills and side air inlet grilles, and added a hand-painted black and red chrome crest to the front hood. Inside the car, the factory Porsche carbon-fiber interior, including steering wheel, complements a factory chromoly rollbar and factory Porsche sport seats. The only non-Porsche addition is a Cargraphic aluminum pedal set and matching foot rest with Turbo script. That, and By Design's custom Audiophile sound system, as if the stock one sucked.
Styled like this, the car was sure to attract even more attention. To maintain the profile, performance was looked after as well. H&R's coilover suspension was installed with factory Porsche GT2 anti-roll bars and GT2-R spherical metal bushings. Again, a Cargraphic aluminum strut brace was the only non-factory piece. A claimed 90 additional horsepower were unleashed with the addition of Gemballa's Power Plant ECU and Cargraphic sport exhaust with 200 cells-per-square-in. cats. English-built Bailey bypass valves were added to ensure reliable function at higher boost levels, while a BMC hi-flow air filter and B&M's short shifter round out the engine and engine-interface changes.
Brembo's 14-in. (355mm) big brake system with four-piston aluminum calipers and two-piece, floating, directional curved-vane rotors fit inside HRE's 540-R wheels, 8.5x19-in. and 11x19-in., wrapped with Yokohama AVS Sports, 235-35ZR19 in front and 315/25ZR19 in the rear.
If you find that your ordinary 911 Turbo doesn't get quite enough looks, or the feeling has faded, you may do well to call Michael Mansouri, the chief of By Design Automotive Group. If he can't get your neighbors' pulses going again, you probably live in a place with lots of grass and little stone monuments, and a silence that could be shattered no more perfectly than by the howl of an uncorked flat six. So do it for yourself.