Hey folks ,

If you know of any 996 owners with the PCCB brakes,
PLEASE advise them to look @www. rennlist / forums / GT2/GT3/ Calling All PCCB Victims.

There is pending litigation that they SHOULD get in on .

I'm sorry that I have no knowledge in setting up a link to that site.

Thanks

they redesigned the PCCB for the 997, and hopefully all its bugs are gone

I know folks who have been using them on the street and track on their GT3s and have had absolutely no problems.

the word on the Racing list is that when they're driven hard, they don't work any better or last any longer, but they -do- cost $9000(!) a corner to replace. they're lighter, but many people have taken them off GT2's and GT3's and put them in a box for the next owner if they sell the car, and have moved back to steel brakes ...

Artechnika,

You hit it on the nail.

Isn't Porsche now saying that they aren't meant for track use?

"now" being the operative word.

LOTS of them were sold with the implication that they were 'forever' disks.

anthony,

Very true...they sold the goods for extreme track / street
brakes.
Now IF you happen to have these PCCBs and you even mention
that you were on the track. Well, you lose!

They will not replace them, they even claim that these PCCB were up to the task of tracking.

The fact of the matter is, if you were sold said product for track / street use and they don't hold up-, who should pay?

Should the consumer have to dish out another $9000.00 / rotor
just because he or she bought their car base on the info
represented on PCNA / PAG web site and the rotor falls apart after a few track sessions? I don't think so...


I'm posting here as a FYI for those 996 / PCCB owner's so they can join in on this legal concern BEFORE it's too late.

I am most likely missing some important point, but if one buys a car and then needs replacement parts, but then is unsatisfied with the cost of those parts or unable to afford them, well isn't that really a consumer obligation to research beforehand? If you buy a GT3RS and then 4 months later it needs an engine rebuild due (to severe race usage) that costs $40K then is it the factory's fault that you can't afford the rebuild? And isn't this syndrome why we see many exotic cars for sale at a deep discount later?

Again, I could easily be wrong but I do not recall seeing any written claims that PCCB was intended for race use or warranted for it. Most guys who do serious track driving know that warranties generally are moot the instant you pull out of the hot pits. In fact, when you pull onto that track you are been unrealistic if you don't "accept" the fact that 100% of that car's replacement cost -- plus potentially much more -- could vaporize at any split-second.

Not that I don't feel a little sorry for anybody caught off-guard by unexpectedly high expenses (BTDT) but brakes in particular are a WEAR ITEM on ANY car. They are consumables, just like tires, gas and wiper blades. F1 cars run bleeding-edge carbon brakes and replace them how often? I dunno, but they are not "forever" items, that's pretty certain...

Just playing the devil's advocate a bit, as personally if I were going racing I would look CLOSELY at which parts the factory had successfully used in a similar application. PCCB on factory race cars??? Rarely if ever seen, as they knew the cost/benefit was very marginal. Honestly, even on street cars, warranty claims on wear parts such as brake friction surfaces will be an extremely tough case IMHO. Personally I would cut my losses and install a set of proven, traditional (iron+alum) high performance brakes and chalk the rest up to experience. But that's just my $.02

not to put too fine a point on it, we're not talking about race use, we're talking about PCA-sanctioned DE events in stock cars.

this is slightly reminiscent of the 996 oil pressure problem and track use. in that case, though, the problem arose only on cars that were using race tires - clearly changing the specification of the vehicle beyond 'stock' and the package the factory warranted.

Porsche has always been represented as the marque you could go take right to the track and hammer on, right out of the box.

i'd have to go back to the earliest days of the introductions of the PCCB to see exactly how the product was marketed and represented. i recall they tried very hard to ccreate the impression that they were 'lifetime of the car' brakes.

the warranty issue is that it is very specific on what it covers, and what it excludes, and under what conditions. the original warranty (evidently) did not exclude PCCB rotors.

while i'm not suggesting it is the case here, there have been cases where marginal parts have escaped into the field in order to reap revenues from their eventual replacement. in this case, i think the product was simply not as good as Porsche had hoped, and the bean-counters are trying to maximise profit by denying the warranty claims.

i do agree with your second point, that experienced track guys understand that some parts are consumable and once you hit the track all bets are off. but at least some of the claimants were -not- experienced track guys - they were guys who'd bought into the hype, had heard that the thing to do to be safe with the car was go to a PCA DE and learn how to handle it and now they're facing big-buck repairs for doing little more than driving the car how they'd always heard it was supposed to be driven.

i think it's a bit of a sad commentary that Porsche's flagship cars (GT2/GT3) using the latest & greatest flagship technology CAN'T be taken to the track for a DE without cooking the brakes -- that was Porsche's claim to fame for 40 years. they probably SHOULD have excluded ALL the brake system for any 'offroad' use but they didn't -- and i think one reason they didn't was that it would reflect badly on the car, and people wouldn't buy the high-margin option (standard, IIRC, on GT2).

more likely, Porsche had high hopes for the technology but it came up short in reality. the old Porsche would have said, "yes, that technology was not as good as we had hoped, we'll replace them ONE time for you, don't come back with this problem again." the new Porsche is saying "the new technology is not good enough for you to drive the car in the manner it was represented to you, you lose, put another double-decaf mocha latté in you cupholder and go back to your carpool."

just MH not-a-lawyer-but-i-was-married-to-one-for-a-long-time O. i don't own a GT3, i've never even seen a GT2, and there are no PCCB's in my future.

i would stick sharpend pencils through my eardrums before i bought a car that had rotors that cost $9k each.

kevin

This is interesting because I actually just read they on the Porsche website the new 997 Cup Cars are going to have PPCB as standard equipment. You think they just worked out the issues?

-Britain

yes.

getting Porsche to solve an engineering problem has historically been good.
getting Porsche to acknowledge an engineering problem has historically been abysmal.

it took them years to fix the real problem behind the 911 chain tensioner failures.
it took them years to fix the real problem behind the 911 exploding CIS airbox.
it took them years to fix the real problem behind the 964 dual-distributor drive belt failures.

they never acknowledged that the original designs were faulty, and some of the explanations offered to justify the redesigned parts were little more than handwaving. but the improved parts, once they materialised, worked.

Here is the article:

997 GT3 Cup Car

Alright, this is an interesting issue and one we've been slow to slam Porsche on. We just haven't seen conclusive FACTS here yet.

YES, some people are having problems
YES, the replacement cost is HIDEOUS.
YES, Porsche has back-peddled with the lifetime rotor claim (though this gets hard to pin down)

BUT:

A number of people aren't having any issues at all (even while tracking their cars) and all this crap about Porsche having been the one car you take onto a track without any worries back in the "good old days" is just that. Remember the non-baffled oil tanks and oil starvation issues? How about chassis cracking? Or anti-roll bar mounts breaking?

Truth is, Porsche makes mistakes, too. Find me a carmaker that doesn't. I suppose we could all drive Corollas...but those are mistakes in themselves. Remember the fine 1972 oil filler flap (which is cool in its own way now, but wasn't so cool for some Oregon (and other) 911T/E/S owners). Do I even need to say "early 964?"

As for early 996 oil starvation problem, YES, it would have been nice if the car had more of a safety margin -- but the real problem was owners putting slicks on street cars that were engineered to be street cars. GT2s and GT3s are street cars first and track cars second. I've seen a guy locally who trailers his GT3 to the track. Why not buy a Cup car, eh?

The bit about Porsche's position changing is wrong. Porsche has always made it clear that track or competition use may void the warranty in their owner's manuals. Still, I know a guy with a 996 C4 with 80,000 miles. About 20,000 of those are track day miles. The car is BEAT DOWN, but it still runs strong and the ONLY problems he has ever had was with the rear main seal and the alarm system. The dealer knows the car's use and has never denied him on any warranty work or "black-flagged" him.

In many cases I hear of, Porsche is fairly gracious in taking care of failures in cars with "questionable" usage. That said, I am sure there are cases where it wasn't, too. But I don't know all the details about either version of customer care, and it gets pretty hard to learn the total "truth" from either side without the "help" of lawyers.

Let's be honest: Driver Education events and PCA time trials put a car through most -- if not all -- of the stress of racing. Even if their drivers don't extract the maximum times, many are "bad" enough to overload many of the car's systems. I remember my first time on track with my 914 at Portland in 1995. I didn't do the last session because I could almost "feel" the wear and tear on my poor old 914. A really long, really fast back road run (unless it's simply punishing or about punishing the car) doesn't come close to the mechanical stress of careful, lap after lap track use. Period.

Porsche shouldn't fund our track days -- days that put huge wear and tear on a car. If owned a GT2 or GT3, I might seriously consider the steel conversion from a wear-item cost standpoint alone. Would I be disappointed to lose PCCB technology? You bet.

I, too, am at some level playing devil's advocate here and will take Porsche to task if it's warranted. And I have posed the PCCB replacement cost issue to Wolfgang Durheimer to his face after a local GT3 went off at Thunderhill. No body damage but needed an oil line, a wheel, and four new rotors due to debris getting in there. The cost? $42,000. That's the rumor, anyway. I have yet to see the bill.

All this said, I'm not sure the group on Rennlist is wrong to be filing a suit. So I'll be watching with interest!

pete

I don't know the particulars of this litigation....nor do I care to. Most all class action suits are not about "justice" for real or imagined issues, but rather to line the pockets of lawyers.

JP,


This tread was posted as an fyi regarding how PCNA / PAG
HAS changed their stance on how they 'service' their customers.

The days of let's take care of the customer vs let's make as much money as possible has come to pass.

This whole case deals with right and wrong... stand behind
what you preach- walk the talk.

We are trying to bring justice to what was sold to us.

Do I have a GT2 - yes I do.. HAVE I tracked it no.
Would love to, but I'm currently putting a '6' together for that.
Was I sold a bill of goodS that was SUPPOSE to be able to handle trank events- HELL YES.

Anyway, this was just an FYI

Hey horizontally-opposed,

Your correct about Wolfgang Durheimer's sad incident at Thunderhill..
Porsche would not cover them..... his car collected some rocks that ate up his PCCBs.

AND Campbelljc,

You are correct in pointing out 'wear items'.
But this is not the issue...we GT2 /3 /X50 OWNERS were
SOLD a set of brakes that some times would not LAST one DE.


Now go figure..

By the way, I'm the one that was asking you about your 914
at Willow two weeks ago ...the one in shorts and just wearing a white Pennys T shirt


PS: Go to Rennlist for some additional PCCB education

No no, Wolfgang Durheimer is the head of R&D at Weissach. I have no idea who the GT3 owner was at Thunderhill -- it's none of my business.

I guess the lesson here, when it comes to a warranty claim for PCCB damage from rocks, dirt, and debris after exiting Turn 10 incorrectly, is: "DON'T GO OFF."

After all, it's a GT3 -- not a Cayenne. Those steel rotors are looking better and better for track use...

pete

horizontally-opposed,

For the present time, steel rotors are the way to go.

One last bump as an FYI