$99,180. For a four-cylinder, two-seat car. This isn’t unprecedented; Lotus charged eighty-one grand for its Esprit S4S way back in 1995, a pricetag that would be equivalent to $129,000 today. But the Esprit was a sleek supercar that could run with Ferraris on the road and beat them in SCCA races. The 718 Cayman S, by contrast, is a squat toad of a car, suspiciously similar in appearance and performance to the decade-old Cayman S that your down-the-street neighbor has had listed on eBay for $17,995 since June, with no takers.

And yet I’ve voted for this car with my wallet, so to speak, having purchased a couple of entries in the Porsche Club of America’s Fall Raffle. I did this because I didn’t read the rules very carefully, as you’ll see below. But there’s still a chance for me to make lemonade out of a lemon — assuming I win said lemon.

The question is: take the car as they’ve built it, or take the money and run?

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Time to “Revive The Passion”. The Porsche Club of America wants its members to get more excited about their money-raising raffles. Although the raffles usually sell out — I’ve waited too long in the past and missed my chance to win cars like a Cayman 2.7 or Cayenne S — presumably the rate of sale is decreasing.

The first step was to offer cash as an option: disgruntled PCA members who were sick of Porsche’s many concessions to modern cost-cutting reality could then go buy the car they really wanted. Now the club has come up with an even better idea.

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