#pca

$99,180. For a four-cylinder, two-seat car. This isn’t unprecedented; Lotus charged eighty-one grand for its Esprit S4S way back in 1995, a pricetag that would be equivalent to $129,000 today. But the Esprit was a sleek supercar that could run with Ferraris on the road and beat them in SCCA races. The 718 Cayman S, by contrast, is a squat toad of a car, suspiciously similar in appearance and performance to the decade-old Cayman S that your down-the-street neighbor has had listed on eBay for $17,995 since June, with no takers.

And yet I’ve voted for this car with my wallet, so to speak, having purchased a couple of entries in the Porsche Club of America’s Fall Raffle. I did this because I didn’t read the rules very carefully, as you’ll see below. But there’s still a chance for me to make lemonade out of a lemon — assuming I win said lemon.

The question is: take the car as they’ve built it, or take the money and run?

Time to “Revive The Passion”. The Porsche Club of America wants its members to get more excited about their money-raising raffles. Although the raffles usually sell out — I’ve waited too long in the past and missed my chance to win cars like a Cayman 2.7 or Cayenne S — presumably the rate of sale is decreasing.

The first step was to offer cash as an option: disgruntled PCA members who were sick of Porsche’s many concessions to modern cost-cutting reality could then go buy the car they really wanted. Now the club has come up with an even better idea.