Win a 2009 Porsche 911 Carrera S (997.2) + $10,000 — or Take $40,000 Cash

What you're looking at

RC04's headline prize is a 2009 Porsche 911 Carrera S: a 997.2, the facelift car, showing 34,000 miles, painted Carrera White, and — the part that matters most — fitted with the six-speed manual rather than the then-new PDK. Behind the rear axle sits the 3.8-litre flat-six rated by the factory at 385 horsepower, breathing through a Sharkwerks sport exhaust.

The rest of the spec reads like a well-sorted weekend car rather than a show build. H&R lowering springs, 18-inch Apex Forged EC-7RC wheels wrapped in Nitto NT555s, a white front lip, and black rock guards behind the front arches. Dropping from the factory 19s to 18s is the tell: that is someone buying more sidewall and cheaper tires because the car actually gets driven. None of it is irreversible, and Sharkwerks is a name the 911 world takes seriously rather than a mail-order muffler.

Why the 997.2 matters

Ask a 911 person where the line is in the 997 generation and they will all give you the same answer: 2009. That is the year Porsche retired the M97 engine and dropped in the 9A1 — direct injection, a fundamentally different bottom end, and no intermediate shaft bearing to lie awake about. Every IMS horror story, every bore-scoring thread, every "has it had the fix?" conversation that shadows a 996 or a 997.1 simply does not apply to this car. That single change is why 997.2 values pulled away from 997.1 values and never came back.

Stack the rest on top and the appeal gets clearer. This is the last 911 generation with hydraulic power steering, before the 991 grew in every dimension and went electric. It is narrow by modern standards, the visibility is honest, and the manual gearbox was still the default rather than a special-order curiosity. The 997.2 Carrera S with three pedals has quietly become the enthusiast's pick of the modern-classic 911s, and a 34,000-mile example is low-use for a car that is now seventeen years old.

That age is also the caveat. A 997.2 is not a maintenance-free proposition — water pumps, coolant lines, high-pressure fuel pumps, and the usual seventeen-year-old-German-car consumables all sit in the future somewhere. The car is awarded as-is, and the giveaway page does not publish service history or a pre-purchase inspection, so budget accordingly rather than assuming a fresh major service comes with the keys.

The fine print worth knowing

This one is a genuine choice, not a formality. The winner picks either the Porsche plus $10,000 cash, or a flat $40,000 cash award. RoadCourseClub caps the maximum ARV of the Grand Prize at $75,000, which puts the car alone at about $65,000 — meaning the cash option is roughly a $35,000 discount on the same prize. Take the cash and you have simplicity; take the car and you carry the resale risk on an as-is 911, but you are almost certainly ahead on paper. Either way the full prize value is taxable income, and the $10,000 riding along with the car is a real help toward that bill without covering all of it for most winners.

On entries: the official rules set the base rate at one entry per whole dollar, and the storefront layers an authorized bonus multiplier on top — $40 Bronze buys 6,000 entries, $100 Silver buys 17,500, and $250 Gold buys 50,000. Monthly memberships run $30, $70, and $150 and award 3,000, 7,000, and 15,000 entries per transaction. The free route is a mail-in postcard worth ten entries, with a separate membership-matching mail-in worth 5,000 entries per month; both the mail-in and paid entries close on the same date, so the free path stays open the entire time the store is selling. The exact card contents and mailing address are printed in the operator's official rules, and it is worth reading the parity math there before you decide how much to spend.

Entries close at 11:59:59 p.m. ET on October 16, 2026, with the drawing on or about October 22. It is open to US residents outside Alaska and Hawaii, 18 or older. The sponsor is Roadcourseclub LLC of Elkhart, Indiana, with American Sweepstakes & Promotion Co. of Rochester, New York, named in the rules as administrator, and the operator publishes named winners from its three previous rounds.