This build started with a bad day at the track.
Foster's neighbor took his Porsche 996 out for a track day and came home with a blown flat-six. Rather than sink money into a car he'd lost his appetite for after sitting for years, he handed the keys to Foster — who was fifteen at the time. That car sat as a project-in-waiting for years before it landed at my shop.
When we finally got serious about bringing it back, the math on the flat-six wasn't pretty. A proper rebuild on a 996 motor isn't cheap, and parts availability only makes it worse. We had a car with good bones and a motor that made no financial sense to fix.
So we floated an idea: what if it didn't put a Porsche motor in at all?
Where the K24 came from
The Honda K24 wasn't a random pick. It traces back to my mentor, who was a die-hard Honda guy — his K24 Civic Si was the kind of car that stuck with you. Reliable, tunable, and capable of serious power without exotic money. When the 996's flat-six turned into a write-off, that memory is what made the swap feel less like a gimmick and more like an obvious answer.
Naming it took about as long as deciding to build it. Porsche plus Honda — we ran through a handful of options before landing on the one that stuck: the Ponda.
The actual problem: making a Honda motor live in a Porsche
Swapping the badge is the easy part. A K24 was never meant to bolt to a Porsche transaxle, so mating the two meant solving three separate problems at once:
- A custom engine mount — the K24 doesn't sit where a flat-six sits, and nothing off the shelf locates it correctly in the 996's engine bay.
- A transmission adapter — to physically join the Honda engine to the Porsche transmission, since the bellhousing patterns and shaft specs share nothing in common.
- A custom flywheel — required to match the K24's crank to the Porsche clutch and transmission input, since nothing compatible exists as a stock part.
None of these existed as a catalog part. They got designed and built specifically for the 996.
Where it stands now
The Ponda is close. Mechanically, it's basically ready to be driven — the swap is done, the drivetrain is mated and running. What's left is finishing touches: possibly a body kit, a wing, and dialing in the tune. We're targeting somewhere around 500 horsepower once tuning is locked in.
What's next
Once the body work and tune are finished, we'll follow up with the final numbers and how it drives — a Porsche chassis with a Honda's reliability and a turbo K24's appetite for boost is not a combination you get to test very often.