The GTS Chronicles - Getting Two/True Sportscars - Delivery Adventure - 2020-2023

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Saturday, July 22, 2023 - To Austria

Our final "positioning" day

Yesterday, on our first day of driving after delivery, we had only managed 360 kilometres. We were going to have to pick up the pace a little, if we were going to achieve our goal of being "in the mountains" by the end of today, and positioned for the start of twisty road driving (which was the plan). But first, we had to clear an item that was a bit pressing to us: installing the protective grills for our front radiator openings.

Protecting our Grilles

Porsche is a bit inconsistent when it comes to protecting the front radiators on their cars from the impacts of rocks and other road debris. In some cars, such as the GT4, there is a robust grill that sits in front of the radiators. On other models, such as our GTSes, there is essentially no grill at all. Why this is was beyond us - perhaps the interplay of style and intended purpose plays a role. In any case, we had resolved before the trip to protect our radiators with one of the several aftermarket grill options available. Originally we thought we would do this on delivery day, but we had simply run out of time. We resolved to do it this morning, before we set off on the day's journey.

Light morning shower

Today had dawned damp. Looking out of our top-floor windows, we saw a bit of drizzle peppering the ground below - and our two 718s. It was looking like it was going to be a wet install, but we had already delayed installation for a day, and wanted to get it out of the way.

The particular grilles we purchased (with the help of Dave Renner, thank you, sir) are from an outfit called "RGS", which, it turns out, stands straight-forwardly for "Radiator Grille Store". They have a three-piece set of front radiator grilles for the 718 GTS 4.0 model.

There are of course several different other suppliers of grilles for the 718 GTS front bumper (or more specifically, the 718's sport-design front bumper variant), and each of them have different characteristics and looks. There are ones that are fixed into place on the front of the bumper openings, in front of the existing bodywork; there are ones that require you to remove the bumper and attach them in from behind; and then there are these RGS grilles, which utilize an insertion method that gets them installed behind the bumper openings, but do not require bumper removal. We chose these for those two reasons primarily, as we valued the behind-the-bumper look but we most certainly did not want to remove the front bumper - especially while on a trip with no access to a garage and tools. We also chose the RGS grilles because the pattern of grillework most closely matched that of the hexagonal pattern on the stock grilles that come on the GT4 (and we had seen those up close and liked them).

Grille Install Time!

I spent some time reviewing the youtube instructions for RGS grille installation. The process involved carefully covering the bumper's plastic with painter's tape, and we had included a generous roll of such tape on our gear list. Along with some hooked manipulation tools and some clippers to cut zip-ties (zip-ties are part of this installation).

Install Prep

We finished our review of instructions and got all of our tools and materials in-hand, then headed down to the little courtyard where the cars were parked. It was still on-and-off drizzle and the ground was damp, so we put a tarp down to keep us at least a little dry. We towelled raindrops off of the front of my Cayman and started applying our blue painter's tape, covering up any part of the bumper that could be touched by the process of inserting the grille pieces.

Nice fitment

We started with the side radiator openings first. The process with the RGS grilles is to essentially bend them slightly, just enough so that you can diagonally work them into the opening until they are fully through it. Then, with the force against them released, the elasticity of the grilles springs them back into a flat shape. You then use a hook tool to grab the grille and pull it back forward and flush against the inside of the opening. The edges of the grille piece are curled-in towards the front, which help grab and hold things in place and at the right angles. Finally, you carefully insert some small black zip ties to fasten the grill tightly against existing support struts in the bumper. And then clip off the excess zip tie material.

The first grille piece on the passenger side of the Cayman was now in. It looked really good - very "OEM", and surprisingly, the zip-ties were practically invisible once clipped off.

We moved to the other side, inserting the driver's side grille, which took less time now that we had the general hang of it. Then on to the center grille. This one was a bit harder to get properly into place and involved a few pushes and pulls using our hook tool to get everything nice and flush. After a bit of this, we had it properly in place. I threaded the zip ties as Luke pulled the grill hard against the inside of the bumper. zip-zip. clip-clip. And we were done.

We stood back and admired our handiwork. It really did look like a Porsche-OEM solution.

The Center Grille

Pushing and pulling

With experience in-hand, applying the grilles to Luke's Boxster probably took only a third of the time it had taken to do the Cayman. It was then time to peel off all of the painter's tape, organize all of our tools, and clean up our sidewalk installation station. And happily, the day had started to dry off. Hopefully the grime-inducing wet roads would be gone by the time we started to roll.

Finished Grille Install

Looks Completely OEM

Southwards Towards Austria

We departed our apartment room in Bubenreuth at around 11 a.m. We first dropped in to the town's grocery store, to stock up on snacks and lunch food that we would then have on hand when we made periodic rest stops on our drive south.

The grill installation and the grocery shopping meant that once again, we were only able to start our driving around noon. We wanted to get directly into the alps today, so that tomorrow we would be able to pick the first of the many "good roads" we had catalogued in our good roads database.

Approaching Old Town Walls, Altdorf bei Nurnberg

Once again, in service of our break-in period and because it was fun to wander, we chose to include small country backroads instead of exclusively high-speed autobahn. We piloted through several small old communities, including through the old square of Altdorf, an old university town. We did a little photography and videography of the Cayman and Boxster moving through here, but found it difficult due to the fairly high traffic volume.

Town Hall, Altdorf

Nice Haunches

From Altdorf, we continued on country roads to the small hamlet of Newmarkt, where we headed off into a local municipal park on the outskirts and found a nice picnic area at which to stop for lunch. Sitting at our table with pleasant grassy fields on either side, we were starting to get that relaxed feel of being on a wandering, free-spirited road-trip.

We had decided that we'd end our day in an advantageous location somewhere in the Austrian portion of the alps. Sitting at our picnic stop, I whipped out my phone and logged into my booking.com account, looking for something which was reasonably priced, properly located, available, and maybe which had some nice quality about it.

It didn't take all that long, and soon we were booked into a quaint-looking spot called the Landcafe & Pension Stadl, in a small hamlet in the mountains of Western Austria. We now had a destination to aim for.

Through Pleasant Fields

Park lunch picnic

Continuing southeast from Newmarkt, we crossed over an area of higher ground with open fields. The higher terrain here was peppered with large electrical windmills. I liked driving across these higher open areas, with their beautiful long-distance views. As usual for Germany, the road through here was impeccable: surface condition clean, attractive signage, fresh road paint, and tidy, trimmed verges.

Luke's Thoughts

[on the Boxster experience...]

I have to say I do like being on my own in the car. Just me and my beautiful machine getting to know each other. I increase the revs now to 5000 RPM, and the exhaust note changes. There's power too, woah. It takes some effort to resist letting the revs climb higher, but it won't take us long given the distances we are traveling, before we will be free to rev all the way to the glorious 7800 RPM redline.

Already I have a sense of the comfort of this car for road-tripping. I was initially a little concerned about the width of the sport-plus seats across my shoulders, but as I wriggle and snuggle along I realize that they are just fine. Different than the S2000, but grippy and snug and not at all uncomfortable.

The day was drawing on, and we decided to make some better time by hopping on the A3 autobahn, keeping in mind our break-in regimen, of course.

The A3 took us around the outskirts of the city of Regensburg, then bent to the east. Now being over 500-kilometres on the odometer, we had a little more revs to play with (max 5500 rpm according to the Preuninger method), and we exercised the cars a bit more on the unrestricted autobahn, getting up to about 170-180 km/hr a few times, before backing off. Needless to say, the cars were completely unperturbed by such trivial speeds.

Wind farm, southern Germany

Not far east of Regensburg, we turned off the autobahn and headed more directly south. We were aiming for a point in the mountains of western Austria, not too far away from the Italian border, to which our imagined itinerary would bring us to the following day.

If you've read any of the trip reports of road-adventures Luke and I have conducted in the past, you'll know that we like our cars to be relatively shiny and fresh. It makes for better pictures and video and it just makes us feel more satisfied seeing our cars not covered in dusty grime. Knowing the scratch-prone behavior of automatic car washes, we stay away from those; hand-operated pressure car washes, on the other hand, yes - we are good with those, since we are never touching the surface with someone else's cleaning implements and we can control the level and angle of water pressure. We've used these many times before on trips with success.

And so when we noticed that the 718 GTSes were getting that noticeable layer of dust and grime on them, we started looking.

Our first wash-up

We found such a self-serve pressure wash place on the outskirts of Eggenfelden, perhaps 20 kilometers north of the Austrian border. It had wide, modern bays. We stopped and sprayed the cars sequentially, as it was a fairly busy spot and there were other cars jockeying for a bay.

With the cars nice and presentable again, we made ready to head off. It was at this point, however, that a large farm thresher in a field adjacent to the car wash came trundling towards us, doing its thing. This was throwing up a visible brown cloud that, with the prevailing breeze, we could see would soon drift directly over the car wash and gas station we were at. Scramble, scramble!

But it was not to be. A fine layer of grain bits and dust was expertly re-applied to our cars. Great.

The Alps Approach

The thresher was making multiple back and forth passes now, and on top of that, time was ticking. No re-wash, time to go. Lesson learned: scan for nearby farm activity when picking one's car wash!

Back on the road, we continued south towards Austria. We could now see the hazy outline of peaks in the distance - the northern edge of the massive continuum of mountains known as The Alps.

We crossed into Austria shortly before 8pm. It was a beautiful summer evening, with golden light and clear air. We were on the outskirts of the city of Salzburg, which we avoided by staying on the highways that bypassed around the city. We could see the sharp prominence of the Untersberg directly ahead of us, its 6,500ft (1973m) high prow punctuating the skyline.

Luke's Thoughts

[on the 718's suitability for road-trippin'...]

As the kilometres continue and we carefully make sure to vary our speed, gears, and revs, I find myself remaining fresh and clear-headed with little sign of the fatigue that one gets when driving in a less-comfortable vehicle. It bodes well for the rest of the trip as we will be covering some long distances and spending lots of time behind the wheel.

One of the niggling back-of-the-mind worries about getting a new vehicle, and knowing my propensity for long drives, has been put to rest. The Boxster is comfortable, plush even, compared to the S2000. The cabin is quieter, the seats are just as comfy, and the fabric is more pleasant to the touch than the leather of the Honda. Put the top down and there's less buffeting, and one should not underestimate the fatiguing effect of both wind and cabin noise in a convertible. Clearly in all those ways this car is a step up from the S2000 and should make those long journeys to see the folks in New Brunswick that much easier.

We continued southward on the E55/A10, entering a large valley (the Salzach Valley) with high forested mountains on either side. We had left the flatlands behind and had entered the alps.

South on the A1

Such a nice cockpit view

It was a beautiful but only gently-curving autobahn highway drive up the Salzach valley, which - apart from making sure to vary our engine speeds - was a cruise-control sort of affair. The evening's golden light gradually faded into dusk, and soon the automatic headlights had turned on and we had a chance to experience a nighttime drive in our 718s for the first time. Cockpit lighting, I can report, is very good, along with the soft glow of the Light Design Package option we had both checked.

Luke's Thoughts

[on continuing to be amazed by the 718...]

A bit of autobahn to make some time allows us to stretch the legs of our cars a little more, and as expected they are completely unperturbed at higher speeds. It's almost like they are laughing at us, and how little we are tapping into their potential so far. "Patience" I keep saying to myself as I smile stupidly in the mirror. I'm grinning a lot, and it's evident in both our voices as we chirp back-and-forth on the radio that we are properly gleeful.

When the sun finally dips down and disappears, I put the top up and suddenly the car is like a cocoon. As the darkness closes in around us, the impressive headlights cut through, and my world shrinks into the cockpit and the gorgeous red Cayman illuminated ahead.

(to read more of Luke's thoughts from this day, check out his blog post)

The highway eventually reached a narrow constriction in the Salzach valley, at which point it then went through a long, well-engineered tunnel. On the other side we entered a more interesting and mountainous upper end of the valley, although everything was now dim outlines against a twilight sky. Our map routing to the hamlet where our room was located then branched us onto a southern route - now a two-lane mountain road known as the Katschberg road. This led us up over curvy but not truly twisty highway to a high pass (Radstadter Tauern Pass), elevation 5,700 ft (1738m). I guess this was the first official mountain road of The GTS Chronicles. Shame that we could not really see any scenery in the rapidly settling night. As a compensation, there was very little to no traffic. We seemed to have the roads to ourselves.

Now in full dark, we got our first chance to experience our headlamps. The highway was brilliantly-lit by our PDLS dynamic xenon headlamps, which turned nicely to illuminate into the depths of each bend. No problems on the lighting front, even though we did not opt for the top-tier LED headlamps.

Landcafe in Stadl

We finally pulled into the parking lot of our Landcafe at around 9:30pm, comfortably within the designated check-in limit of 10pm. For a moment, we were slightly worried that we had arrived too late, since the place seemed quiet and dark, but upon entering there was a single lady up at the bar that greeted us (I don't mean that she was single, just that she was the only person in the room). She greeted us warmly, and of course had known from the online booking that we were coming.

We were told that unfortunately the evening dinner time was now over but that breakfast would be provided in the morning. She led us up some back stairs to our accommodation - a quaint sloped-roof room with two bunk beds, then gave us a set of keys that would let us directly access the stairwell from a back door - which we then used to quietly shuffle in our overnight stuff from the cars.

And so, that marked the end of July 22 - the second full day of The GTS Chronicles Euro Delivery road-trip. We had covered an additional 460 kilometres, bringing our total to 819km.

Interactive trackmap with photo points - July 22 - click map to view

Interactive trackmap with photo points - July 22 - click to view

July 22 - Drive Data

Start Time: 11:01a.m.

End Time: 9:34p.m.

Duration: 10h32m

Distance: 459.18 km (285.32 mi)

Average Speed: 43.6 km/hr (27.1 mph)

Start Elevation: 765ft (233m) *

Max Elevation: 5656ft (1724m) *

Min Elevation: 765ft (233m) *

End Elevation: 2893ft (882m) *