Project 718 Cayman T: Part 11 – DSC Sport V3 Controller

Installing the DSC into the 718 is pretty easy. Remove the tool kit thing from the driver’s side of the frunk and pull back the liner; driver’s side being for everyone except the odd-ball countries where people drive on the left side of the road. Anyway….. I then unplugged the interior frunk light and removed it from the liner. I keep my seat cover and blanket for the dogs stored in the frunk in case you were wondering.

You need a 10mm socket to remove the two nuts holding in the stock PASM/PADM module. You can see my smaller, 718 specific, mounting flanges compared to the OEM module that goes in a number of different Porsche models.

The factory module has a stamped aluminum backplate. Mine is quite a bit heavier being a solid chunk of aluminum. Plus, the thermal gap pad is relatively heavy. I’m curious if the factory module has a thermal gap pad in it; though I don’t think it does based on how light the module felt.

In the 718, the mounting bracket for the PASM/PADM is a thin sheet metal bracket which also felt like aluminum. This bracket is relatively flimsy, so Porsche was really shaving every gram they could for weight reduction. Now that I have an aluminum backplate on the DSC, the heat generated will be conducted to the aluminum bracket to the chassis. An interesting tidbit, and it makes perfect sense, the module runs hotter in Normal mode than Sport mode. Just tooling around, the electrical current to the dampers in Normal mode is about twice that of Sport mode. Heat generation is a function of electrical current squared, so running in Normal mode should be about four times the heat generation compared to Sport mode. This goes for the factory PASM/PADM module too. Oh yeah, using only two nuts instead of four was another weight and cost reduction. After I’m done tuning the DSC, maybe I’ll remove the USB cable. For now, I’m leaving the cable hanging in the frunk.

I’ve only street driven the car with the DSC so far, but the initial impressions are good. There is a slight change in operation as the suspension mode setting is now divorced from the Sport Chrono knob on the wheel. Now, only the center console button tells the DSC what mode to be in. Also, the car stays in whatever mode you left it in when you last shut off the car instead of resetting to Normal whenever cranking the car up. Normal mode floats over railroad tracks and all the cracks and bumps in the crappy roads around me. Sport mode rides stiffer. The car does these things because I could make the car do those things by tuning the DSC. Brake dive and rear-end squat are significantly reduced. At about 70% cornering effort in both Normal and Sport modes in a couple long sweepers, the car was stable with well-controlled body motions. I did some simulated slaloms on a smooth road and I did observe an interesting behavior with my particular settings. In Normal mode, the rear dutifully followed the front. In Sport mode, the rear of the car felt like it wanted to rotate more quickly, but still staying stable and planted. Basically, the car felt like it transitioned side-to-side more quickly by staying flatter and rotating more quickly. I have a couple track days lined up, so I’ll adjust my suspension calibration if I feel the need to adjust the handling balance and damping for big bump behavior.

I may have said before that I wasn’t going to do any more track days until I got the alignment fixed with proper camber. Well, I got new parts installed that allowed me to set the alignment to something that won’t destroy the outside edges of the tires. If you were wondering what was going on with the RaggDoll Motorsport RENNEN turbo upgrade, I’m on the second tune updated from Stratified Auto. We probably have a few more iterations to go to dial it in completely. I can tell you the car pulls nice and smoothly all the way to the 7500rpm on straight 91 octane while pushing 4psi more boost at redline than the stock turbo on 93 octane. Y’all will just have to wait for the update after the track days.

*Spoiler Alert* I just did two track days. The rear stepped out on me on turn-in a couple times, so I adjusted the rear rebound settings. I changed them from 2/4/6 (low/med/high) to 1.5/3/4.5. That seemed to tame down the rear a smidge on turn-in. My alignment settings are: front -3.0 cambr, 9.5 caster, 0 toe, rear -2.5 camber, 2mm toe-in per side. I’ll add more details in the next article.