I raced an 08 Cayman S against my stock 05 S2000. Beginning of the day, I was on his tail the whole time.(very technical course) Later in the day, I just couldn't quite stay with him. A Cayman is a nicer car in my opinion, but you'd be paying at least a 10k premium for a decent used one. Then Porsche parts... It's an upgrade many have done and one of my likely options if I sell the S2K. Is it going you blow you away? No.

 

 

Minimum needed to track one is the cost of a replacement motor in the bank which isn't $3k like the S2000.

 

 

A family member recently had to replaced the motor on his, it needs a sump especially if you're a fast driver on sticky tires. Motor gave on turn 5 of Road America. Also need an under drive pulley and a cooler for power steering system. He got the motor rebuilt to race spec, never did reveal how much that cost, guessing $25-30K. He's wicked fast now on R888.

To be fair he did get 36K miles with a bunch of those on track before the engine blew up.

 

That sounds like around the right price. 36K miles isn't very much compared to some recorded hours i've seen for F20 and F22s. I know one guy that got 148K miles out of his, almost exclusively track days and canyon carving - motor blew on a money shift. Another track buddy got over 100 track days and ~100K miles out of his F22 - motor lost compression after a money shift as well.

To the OP:
There's a lot of other cars that I would love to track, but I'm not a point where I'm willing to shell out more than $8k for a blown motor.

I'm also not willing to buy a car for more than $25k for just the chassis, and stuff it into a wall. I suspect that any car I get these days is at least ~$10K for me to get it track reliable - brakes, tires, wheels, suspension, cooling, basic maintenance.

I could definitely afford a lot more car to just have and drive around on the street and canyon carves, but affording a car for street use is very different from a car for regular track use. Consumables, maintenance, and repairs are all very real considerations that put most cars out of my budget. Everyone's budget and tolerance for risk varies, so, you might be cool doing a lot more.

I also get where you're coming from with driving your S on the street now - mine rarely gets driven for anything much more than track events now. It's kind of a pain with the 6-point and rollbar, but even prior to that, I wasn't driving it much anyway, so it makes sense to have it.

 

 

So, I had heard of the IMS issue on the Porsche, so I wanted to see how much an engine actually would be. They are selling long blocks for the Cayman S used for 8-10K! Thats about double the cost of the S2000 engine.

I mean, if I had the money, I would probably own a newer Porsche, but... I don't quite have that much. As I had said earlier, I think the s2000 is quite capable and can be made pretty fast for 10K or so in modifications. There are some super expensive parts for the S2000 that can be had, but there are cheap parts as well. For the Cayman, they are just all expensive.

 

IMS isn't an issue for +09, which moved to direct injection and got rid of the IMS from the motor design completely.

All of that said, There's something to be said of running costs and reliability.

This hobby isn't cheap in the slightest.

My philosophy is that:
I'm not the fastest running the s2000. I know what kinds of laptimes people in similar prepped cars are running. If i'm not close to that then I have work to do.
As far as going fast, it's all relative. At the end of the day, there will aways be someone faster, whether in a faster car or better driver, or both.

It's more important that i'm just able to go out and drive, trouble free, than it is for me to be "faster".
I'm really not "racing" at this point, so "winning" at is being able to go out and drive. It's measured on a smiles per dollar metric.

It really is all about your end goal. If you're doing HPDEs and some basic time attack stuff that's casual fun, then the s2k is awesome. If you want to race and want to win, find another chassis - this one is expensive to make competitive with the porsches, bmws, and corvettes in a built to class rules book competition.

I'm approaching 60 track days at 105k miles. The only other car I could think of that would match this budget is an mx-5.