Some of you may remember an article we published last December where we announced that PorschePurist.com entered into an agreement with Flying Lizard Motorsports naming our site as the first U.S. based Flying Lizard Merchandise Affiliate Partner and gave all of our readers a 10% discount on Flying Lizard Gear to kick things off. The response was so great, we’re doing it again! Only this time it’s different. Way different.

Not only is Flying Lizard offering a discount to PorschePurist readers on all their excellent gear (see the second half of this post for more details), they are offering our readers a chance at a private and intimate “behind the scenes tour” of the Flying Lizard Paddock. If you’re a Porsche race fan and plan on attending this year’s ALMS series premiere at the Mobil1 12 Hours of Sebring then don’t miss this chance of a lifetime!

Flying Lizard’s Team Manager, Eric Ingraham, will lead a small group of PorschePurist’s readers on a tour of the Flying Lizard Paddock for a chance to see what really happens as a world class race team prepares for one of the biggest races of the season. In order to keep the tour as intimate and detailed as possible, we want to limit the group to just ten (10). This way, not only can we tour the paddock areas, but we may also enter and explore the trailers*, view the cars, meet more of the team and possibly, just possibly some of the drivers (but no promises).

The tour will be on Thursday the 18th of March from 5:15 pm to 5:45 pm. If you are interested in taking part in this exclusive behind the scenes look, and plan on being at Sebring Thursday afternoon, then here’s what you need to do. Simply respond to this post in a comment below letting us know you want to attend – make sure you fill out the form completely to include a good email address (Read this post for help on commenting if you need it). We will then randomly pick the winners and contact each one of you individually by Monday the 15th.

At first we were going to select contest winners from first responders, but that gives an unfair advantage to those of you who receive our newsletter via RSS vs. email. For those of you who do get PorschePurist via email, make sure you click through to the site to leave a comment on the post (don’t simply reply to your newsletter email).

As the attendance is so very limited -and exclusive access to the paddock like this so rare – please, please, please only enter if you are 100% sure you can make it! If you have other questions just let us know.

Now about that discount for the Flying Lizard Merchandise

Last, but definitely not least, is a 10% discount on all Flying Lizard Merchandise. This discount is available to any and all PorschePurist.com reader between March 11, 2010 and March 18, 2010. Simply enter “PorschePuristSebring″ (it IS case sensitive) on the first page of your cart and the savings will be automatically applied!

Remember, the discount code “PorschePuristSebring” gets you 10% off all Flying Lizard Merchandise and is only good online. We recently received a bunch of Flying Lizard Gear and were impressed with the overall quality. Included in our bag of swag was a woman’s hoodie for me and a couple of co-branded items for John.

What’s co-branded? These items (such as the Casual Dress shirt and the Team Cap) are branded with both the Porsche Motorsport Logo and the Flying Lizard. It’s a great way to show your loyalty to our favorite automotive marque and racing team at the same time. We’ll give you a full review on Flying Lizard Gear in our next post.

For now, enjoy the saving, good luck with the contest and I hope to see you at Sebring!

Related Porsche Posts
Interview with Flying Lizard Joerg Bergmeister
Interview with Flying Lizard Patrick Long

*The Fine Print: It’s possible some areas of the paddock may be unavailable during our tour if their is any proprietary race set-up taking place or anything else that must remain behind closed doors for competitive reasons. Regardless, it will be a very exciting tour.

A large number of you (many thousands at this point) receive PorschePurist’s updates via email. This means every time we publish or post a new story, you receive an email in your in-box with the title and copy of that post. A number of you, a large number, have reached out to let us know, when it’s a really busy week, that this can be a bit overwhelming. Well, we heard you and we’ve made some changes.

Take last week for instance, it was a busy, busy week in the world of Porsche. News items of interest included everything from updated information and pictures on the new Porsche 911 GT3 R to Porsche’s race results in the Dubai 24 hour race (spoiler alert, not only did they win, but Porsche took 7 out of the top 10 positions) and that’s only the beginning. Guess what, we covered each of these stories and published a post about them here on PorschePurist.com. However, we changed our mailing list rules so that not everything gets sent out as an update.

What Does This Mean to You?

It means you can still count on PorschePurist to send you the latest and interesting news about Porsche directly to your email. If something is important and we feel it should be covered immediately, you’ll get an email update in your in-box the morning after we publish the post (if you want to get updated faster, in real time, you can subscribe via RSS). However, if there are a number of news stories that aren’t part of our normal coverage or items that are simply “press material” from the Porsche PR machine, we’ll post them on the site but won’t send you an email. In order to find them you’ll either have to check out our sitemap of archived Porsche posts that shows every page on the blog in chronological order from newest to oldest (this is also a great place to look for past posts that those of you new to PorschePurist might have missed) or, we’ll occasionally send out a digest post with links to what you may have missed. For example, here are 5 items of note from last week:

1. Porsche Starts the 2010 Motorsport Year with a Win in the Dubai 24 Hour Race
2. Porsche Consultancy Wins Yellow Angels Award
3. Marco Holzer Enters His Third Year of Training with Porsche
4. Porsche Sports Driving School and Porsche Travel Club Activities in 2010
5. 2010 Porsche 911 GT3 R Almost Sold Out Before Launch

How to Interact with other PorschePurist Readers

At least 75% of the PorschePurist’s subscribers receive their updates via email. This means there are literally thousands of you getting an update from us a couple of times a week in your in-box. It’s only natural, if you have a comment or thought about a post, to hit reply and respond to that email. The problem with this is that it simply sends an email to the administrative account here at PorschePurist. We don’t mind getting your emails, but a lot of times there are some great comments, questions or criticisms that would be fantastic to share with everyone else. If time allows, we do our best to reach out to you and ask if we can re-post your comments directly on the site. Almost 100% of the time, readers are surprised that their comment came to an administrator vs posting on the comment section of the site.

What’s the point of all this technical information? Simple, we think a lot more of you want to interact with other Porsche owners and fans and to express your thoughts and opinions on our posts. This is a simple reminder that WE WANT YOU TO DO THIS (good, bad or indifferent) and it’s why PorschePurist.com is set up as a blog vs. a static web-site. Your comments are welcome! In fact, your comments are the fuel that drive our little community. If you receive an email update and have something to say, all you need to do is click on the TITLE of the post. This action will bring you to the published article and if you scroll to the bottom you’ll see an area to comment (try it out on this post as an experiment). You’ll be asked to enter you’re name and email and then you can comment away.

If you’ve never commented before your contribution will be held in a Que to be approved by an administrator and once we’ve done so it will appear on the site. After you’ve had a comment approved for the first time any additional comments on the same post (or a different one) will publish automatically.

We hope these new publishing measures and commenting guidelines allow you to interact more with your fellow Porsche owners and relieves some of the burden on your overflowing in-box. If you would like to see additional changes or have something to say just let us know by commenting below. After all, this is as much your community as it is ours.

It’s the end of the year and things are winding down. As part of our process to get ready for the new year we decided to spend some time looking through the site’s statistics and analytics. we won’t bore you with number of visits, page views and all that gibberish. What we did put together was a list of the top 10 Porsche posts based on the number of times a page was viewed by our readers. With a little help from Wayne and Garth here’s the PorschePurist Top 10 List for 2009.

10. 1987 Porsche 959 For Sale on Ebay (Otherwise know as, “Is Ralph Lauren Selling His 959?)
9. 7 Tips To Avoid Speeding Tickets in Your Porsche
8. Porsche Tapiro by Giorgetto Giugiaro
7. New Porsche Museum In Stuttgart Set To Open To The Public
6. 6 Things You Should Know About Red Light and Speed Cameras if You Drive a Porsche
5. Porsche N Spec Approval. Understanding it When Choosing Tires
4. The Space Shuttle and Commercial Airplanes Use Nitrogen In Their Tires. Should You Use it in Your Porsche?
3. Lego Porsche 911
2. Winterizing and Preparing your Porsche for Storage
1. Jerry Seinfeld’s Porsche 993 Turbo S

Related Posts
Top 10 Porsche Posts of 2008

If someone offers you the keys to a free Porsche, do you say no thanks?  I didn’t think so.  Neither do we!

In early October, the commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) voted unanimously to approve new guidelines that requires web-sites like PorschePurist.com to disclose any freebies, swag, or other form of payment we get from companies whose product(s) we review or write about.  The idea behind the ruling makes sense and is designed to make sure that consumers (that’s you) don’t get duped by wildly skewed testimonials (“even though I’ve never raced before, once I used Product XYZ on my Porsche, I won every race I entered!”) or overly enthusiastic product reviews (“this is THE best Porsche product on the market and you MUST buy one!”).  In theory, this is a great idea.  In practice, the guidelines simply aren’t that clear.

The new rules went into effect on December 1, 2009 and could result in a fine of up to $11,000 for offending web-sites.  As you know, this site is published for FREE and we have more expenses than income (more on this later) so we decided to err on the side of caution and point out what we think is otherwise obvious…

1. PorschePurist.com has sponsors

Those sponsors are clearly labeled as such and if we write about them – which you can be sure we will – we’ll remind you.  If you want to be a sponsor, let us know and we can talk more about how we decide on who we accept.

2. We get free stuff, including Porsches

In addition to our sponsors, PorschePurist.com gets free stuff and other swag (including the occasional Porsche press car).  As the site becomes more popular, the amount of swag we’re getting keeps increasing.  Most of this stuff is Porsche related and we will review most of it, eventually, here on the site.  If it’s not somehow Porsche related, we either give it away in a contest, donate it to a worthwhile cause, or sell it for cash on eBay (again, more on this later).

3. We make money when you buy stuff

PorschePurist.com belongs to affiliate networks from companies like Amazon and Commission Junction.  These type of programs provide us with a small payment in the form of a commission anytime someone purchases a product from those links or after clicking through to the site.   Not every link on our site is an affiliate link, in fact, most are not.  However, it’s a safe bet that any link to Amazon or similar retail sites are a link that we will get a commission from if you buy a product while there.

Why do we do this?

PorschePurist.com is a labor of love and we publish it for FREE.  If you’re not familiar with our story, I encourage you to learn more about us.  As the site has become more popular (freakishly so) it incurs expenses at a level we never imagined (things like bandwidth, hosting, design, promotion, etc.).  We’re not complaining, in fact, just the opposite, we enjoy it!  However, all these expenses add up and they usually add up to more than we receive in return (at least monetarily).  By accepting sponsors, joining these affiliate programs, and selling unsolicited stuff we receive on eBay , we’re able to continue publishing the site and offer it for free to all of our readers.  We are very particular about our sponsors and the products we choose to promote (you would be amazed at some of the offers we’ve received) and hope you think so too.

If you want to support PorschePurist.com, the easiest and best ways are to simply keep reading, tell others about the site and encourage them to subscribe, visit and support our sponsors and, if you’re going to buy something for your Porsche, or something Porsche related, do so from our site using links like this one from Amazon or the Tire Rack (you don’t pay a penny more and it supports our efforts).

What does all this mean to you?

Simple, if you read a product/book/car review on PorschePurist.com you can pretty much guarantee the manufacturer, publisher, artist, etc. sent it to us for free.   Sometimes we ask them to (as there is stuff we’re interested in and think you will be too) and sometimes they send it unsolicited.  If we review something we paid for ourselves, we’ll probably let you know that too.  If enough people like that particular item we’ll probably contact the manufacturer, publisher, artist, etc. to see if they want to pay us back. 

But, and this is a bit BUT, regardless if we received the product for free or not, we always review it the same way- objectively.  We consider our readers our friends and we will not willingly or knowingly steer you toward a product we don’t believe in, use ourselves, or like.  In fact, every time we review a product, book, car, etc. we will always try to point out the pros and cons (nothing’s perfect, not even Porsche’s cars).

Thanks again to everyone who subscribes and reads our posts.  Your comments and continued support are all the encouragement we need.  However, clicking through to a sponsor or buying something from one of our links doesn’t hurt either…

There are only 7 shopping days left until Christmas and less than 24 hours to save 10% on Flying Lizard Team Gear. If you missed the post last week then you can click over to read all about PorschePurist.com being named the first U.S. based Flying Lizard Merchandise Affiliate Partner. The best part about this partnership is the 10% savings we’re offering to kick things off!! Remember, if you don’t want to read through the whole announcement again, simply enter “PorschePurist10″ (don’t forget it IS case sensitive) on the first page of your cart and the savings will be calculated automatically.

Porsche Gift Ideas

If you’re still looking for last minute Christmas gifts for the Porsche lover (or for yourself) there’s a great list available in this post about 30+ Gift Ideas for the Porsche Lover on Your Christmas List.

PorschePurist.com closing out 2009

As we get ready to celebrate the New Year (can you believe it’s already 2010) we’ll be wrapping things up with our own Top 10 Porsche Posts for the year, a follow-up to our Porsche Motorsport 101 post and a few other choice goodies.

I’ve never been a big fan of these promotional/marketing type posts, but in this case it’s different. I’m a huge Porsche Motorsport fan and an even bigger fan of the Flying Lizard team. So, it gives me great pleasure to announce that PorschePurist.com has entered into an agreement with Flying Lizard Motorsports that names our site as the first U.S. based Flying Lizard Merchandise Affiliate Partner. In recognition of this new partnership, the Flying Lizard team is offering our readers a 10% discount on all gear purchased between now and December 19th! Simply enter “PorschePurist10″ (it IS case sensitive) on the first page of your cart and the savings will be automatically applied!

Coupon Code for Flying Lizard Merchandise

In addition to offering PorschePurist.com’s readers exclusive discounts (like the one above), our new partnership will provide other exceptional offers and promotions including exciting and unique product offerings.

More on Flying Lizard Motorsports

2 of Porsche’s Factory Works drivers (Joerg Bergmeister and Patrick Long) called the Flying Lizard team home for the 2009 season. Johannes van Overbeek, Darren Law and Seth Neiman (team principal) rounded out the roster. While the Lizards have not yet announced their plans for 2010, I know I’m not alone in hoping things remain the same given the team’s overall success last year.

For now, please join me in welcoming Flying Lizard to PorschePurist.com and enjoy the 10% savings opportunity.

Related Posts
25% off Select Porsche Books
Flying Lizard Motorsport Featured in Forza Motorsport 3

[Source: 993C4S]

By now, the observant among you have surely recognized the new look and new name of your favorite Porsche website; this one! The name and logo have changed from 993C4S.com to PorschePurist.com. Why? Simple actually. Some of you felt the old name was too confusing, a bit too model specific if you will. I agreed. While I love my 993, it’s not my only Porsche and it’s not the only thing this site is about. PorschePurist.com is about the Cars, Products and Lifestyle that are such an important part of our favorite marque, Porsche.

How does the change affect you? It doesn’t! You will still receive your updates via email or reader, same as always. Any saved bookmarks or links to posts will continue to work and you can still navigate directly to the site the same way as always. The new site design will make it easier for you to move around and find articles and posts relevant to the subject(s) you’re interested in.

Over the next few weeks I will roll out a number of new features to the website including an updated Motorsport section, improved search functions (making it even easier to find relevant content), updates to the resource pages and much more.

For right now, I would like to introduce everyone to PorschePurist.com’s two newest sponsors: The Road Scholars and Etón Corporation. I’ve made it a point to try and affiliate myself with only the best in the industry, those organizations that truly represent the exceptional quality and heritage that are integral to the Porsche brand. I think these two new companies fit squarely within that definition and compliment our existing sponsors. By supporting our sponsors, you help to support PorschePurist.com. That allows me to continue delivering fresh, informative and occasionally entertaining content including product reviews, purchasing advice, entertaining Porsche news stories, maintenance tips, Porsche resources and much more.

The Road Scholars

The addition of The Road Scholars provides you with another great source for quality, air-cooled cars and I encourage you to check out their web-site, read their story and browse through the inventory. While you’re on the site, feel free to reach out to Kevin or Cam (the two owners) as they love to talk Porsche.

Etón Corporation’s Porsche Designed Stereos

Etón Corporation is probably best known as the licensee and distributor of Grundig shortwave radios. Over the years, as the radio industry has grown, so has Etón. They recently reached a deal with the Porsche Design Group to manufacture and sell the P’9120 and P’9110 line of Porsche Audio Equipment. I reviewed the Porsche Design P9′120 a few months ago and was just recently told to expect the P’9110 Porsche Design Emergency Crank radio to arrive shortly for review. God knows, I could have used it this last weekend after losing power for four (4) days in the big ice storm we had here in the north east.

Please look around the new site and let me know what you think of the new logo and site design. While you’re here, be sure to click on some ads and help keep the lights on.

Related Posts
Review of the Porsche Design P’9120 by Eton
Time for a Change Part II
Time for a Change