Porsche Boxster Spyder could you make one yourself for half the price?

Another promo video of the Porsche Boxster Spyder, this time being taken for a Sunday morning drive around the Monterey Area of California. Looks and sounds (assuming the engine noises have not been enhanced in the clip) like the perfect car for this sort of activity.



At the end the driver is shown erecting the hood, while not exactly the painless effort the standard Boxster's power hood is, certainly looks a lot easier to assemble than the similar efforts on the Murcielago Roadster or Ferrari 550 Barchetta? My initial thoughts that this would be a warm weather only car and while that still holds true it may be more acceptable in the UK than first thought (although possibly not in the recent biblical levels of rain we have suffered).



One concern with this car is the price, at £44,000 it seems rather expensive for a stripped out car (the days of the bargain priced 968CS are long gone). However with the price of used Boxsters now quite reasonable and plenty available (200 on Pistonheads when I last looked and that was just the 986 versions) it should be possible to make something similar for half the price?


Lets say start with a used 3.2S say £12,000 for an early noughties example with half decent mileage. Most of the weight saving for the Boxster Spyder comes from removing the power roof, so that would have to go. No idea what is involved or what it would cost but as a certain Jeremy Clarkson often says "how hard can it be?"


While the humps behind the rool hoops on the Spyder are not available, Porsche have offered similar humps for the standard Boxster for a long time (around £700 from good Porsche parts suppliers) these would also be needed to cover the gap left by the absence of the roof.


Optionally (but I would) you could fit one one of the Porsche Aerotek body kits (approx £1,000) to give the car a slighty racier look (the standard body looks a little anodyne on the early Boxster to me), and a set of GT3 style 18" rims (£1,200 for a set of four).

As there is now no hood it would probably be prudent to invest in a hardtop (£3,000ish), which would make the car more usable in winter than the Spyder itself?


Interior wise a good set of figure hugging recaros (or perhaps a set of GT3 items) should be around £400 each.


Finally an early Boxster S makes around 240bhp well short of the Spyder's 320bhp. I suppose a 996 engine conversion is possible but I understand the while possible it's not as easy as you would imagine (the 996 engine is mounted the other way round to the Boxsters for a start). So instead I would look at a Turbo or supercharger conversion. I surf of the net found this system for just under £5,000, and should give more than enough power to match the Spyder.


http://www.turboperformance.com/products/986987-ATPL-Low-Pressure-Turbo-System/

Okay we need to add labour onto all these costs but I reckon that it would be possible to do all this for around £25,000, which would lead more than enough change from £44,000 to afford somethng practical for those rainy days.