Installing front camber plates on a Porsche 981 Cayman or Boxster

Описание: Installing elephant racing front camber plates on a 2014 Porsche 981 Cayman

See follow up below for how this did.

Thanks to Jeff Richardson for the luggage scales torque wrench trick.    • World's most versatile torque wrench  

Follow up Nov 2025:

After 15K miles and 12 months with the Elephant Racing units, they had developed a couple of issues. There is significant rattle in at least one of the ball joints. This was just getting louder and the ball could be rattled by hand once the unit was taken out. Taken out? Yes, more below. Also road debris and water on the steering roller bearings has also resulted in some roughness that could be felt in the steering wheel. After such a short time I was not too happy. Questions to Elephant Racing on how much rattle is considered normal went unanswered. The amount of camber they enable was still not enough to remove all tire wear issues when running on track.

So, where to from here?

New to the market is a camber plate made by Vorshlag. They have a good reputation from parts made for other makes. They now have camber plates that will fit the 718/981/982 and will fit any shocks and springs you can think of, including my OEM ones. They have been super responsive and patient with all my questions, so I have switched to their camber plates.

https://vorshlag-store.com/collection...

For installation, this time I undid the top bolt of the drop link. I still compressed the springs in the car, but this time I could take the whole strut out to replace the plates. It was tight, hence compressing them to get them clear of the fender. Installation was otherwise easy.

Once in, I found the Vorshlag enabled more negative camber. The most the Elephant racing could do was -2.4 degrees and the Vorshlag can go to -3.25 (and -3.47 on the right). A significant gain. A symmetric -3.25 would be a 0.85 more negative than the Elephant Racing (which were about 1 more that stock).

To get that level of negative camber usually requires changing the lower control arms, which in turn means you need longer toe links, which can effect caster and bump steer (dynamic toe) and before long you have a long list of parts and a very big bill. This camber plate offers the ability to get the camber you need for track without spending as much as buying an entire old track focused Miata.

The four Allen bolts on these plates suggest you can dial in more camber at the track and dial it out for the street at the end of your track day. That would be great, but the reality is that you can't. I would love to have -3 degrees camber for the track and then dial it back to factory spec of 0 to -1 degrees, but if you change the camber, your alter the toe, by a lot! And a lot means lots of inside edge tire wear and the wrong steering stability. The reason this happens is that the bottom pivot point for the camber change is the ball joint in the lower control arm. You can imagine tilting the whole strut in and out while that bottom point remains unchanged. While doing this, the steering link (tie rods) remain where they are and they are some way up the strut from the bottom, so as you tilt the strut in and out the connection to the steering tie rod means you are also rotating the strut and hence changing the toe. We found it is close to one to one with one degree change in camber giving a one degree change in toe. Toe settings are usually close to zero so whole degrees here is way too much to just live with. The tires will be badly worn on the inside edge.

The change in toe is in the direction you would like. At the track where you want a bit more negative camber, that will give more toe out, but the toe changes are just too large. I did a compromise. We set -2.4 for street and -2.7 for track. With changes between those changing the toe by about 0.3 degrees, so we dial both camber settings to something that works. Some toe in for the street and mild toe out for track.

Given all this I wonder why the four camber adjusting Allen bolts are there? Just to reduce wear on the factory camber adjustments? Perhaps expecting this to be a race team changing all the alignment settings all the time.

The steering bearing looks to be sealed and Vorshlag are confident in their ball joints.

So we shall see how this goes.


Original chapters:

00:00 - Introduction
00:23 - Why
00:29 - Elephant Racing Plates
01:48 - Plan for no strut removal
02:25 - Drop link nut
03:42 - Compressing the spring
06:16 - Undoing the top
07:48 - Lowering the strut
08:07 - Removing the camber plate
09:03 - Preparing the new plate
10:30 - installing the plate
12:08 - Decompressing the spring
12:36 - Doing up all the nuts with correct torque
15:50 - Results