Who doesn’t want to a get a little Dr. Frankenstein; mixing and matching the best parts and creating your very own hybrid-creature? Though more often seen with the affordable sports car – nowadays, an LS1-swapped 240SX has a hard time standing out from the crowd, there’s potential with some of the mid-range sports cars that lack a little in the propulsion department. So, what would happen if someone took a world-class chassis and improved it with a stouter powerplant?
Well, once the hordes crying blasphemy quieted down, they’d be left with a wonderful mixture of American muscle and German precision. The Limitless Motorworks Cayman has made it hard for the purists to argue with the performance offered by the 5.0-liter Coyote engine sitting behind the seats.
Take a base Porsche Cayman from a decade ago – a car that’s becoming affordable for the average enthusiast, and buy an “Aluminator” crate engine from Ford Performance. Then, bolt on a KW Clubsport suspension, decorate the corners with CCW Corsair C2K wheels measuring 18×10″ at the front and 18×12″ at the rear, and shod them in Nitto NT05 tires. Considering the motor chucks out 424 wheel horsepower and 364 lb-ft of torque, that rear tire will have to be very meaty. The resulting combo is amazing.
Interestingly but not surprisingly, the stock Cayman transmission can handle the shove offered by the American V8 – Porsche products are usually built to be insanely robust. However, the engine required custom wiring to get the two pieces to work, and the firewall was chopped and pushed forward so that the Coyote could be shoehorned in.
The engine might’ve only cost $14,000 – peanuts compared to the Porsche motor – but getting all these alien components to work together wasn’t easy, and would cost a customer somewhere around $70,000 for a turnkey build. It might raise the center of gravity a bit, and it might provoke some sniffy looks at the next Porsche meet, but pissing off the old guard is one of life’s simple pleasures, and an opportunity to do so should never be squandered.