I Put A Winch On My Porsche Cayenne And I Kind Of Hope I Never Have To Use It

You have no idea what it's like to be nervous until you're sitting on the ground in front of the pristine factory bumper of your Porsche Cayenne with a cutoff wheel and only a vague idea of where the hole needs to go. This was the culmination of around eight hours of labor over the weekend when I decided to finally get around to installing a brand new 10,000 pound winch from Borne Off Road (a new sister company to Mishimoto) that has been sitting on my workshop shelf all year. Aside from a whole lot of sweat, a few choice swear words, and a scraped knuckle, I came out the other side no worse for wear, and with a nice new off-road accessory that I hopefully won't ever get into rough enough shape to need. 

A few months ago I drove the Cayenne down to Eurowise to get a few components installed, including their two-inch lift, brush bar, winch plate, and skid plates. After a thorough once-over by a trusted Porsche technician, the rally pig was given its 100,000 mile clean bill of health. All I needed to do in order to finish the job was get the winch and rally lights installed. This big beefy winch already had somewhere solid to mount, I just had to get it bolted up, wired, and looking right. 

Late last year a friend of mine and I signed up to drive on this year's Alcan 5000 rally, which is coming up in a couple of months and I have been meaning to get this winch installed. The weather was nice, so it was as good a time as any. If I'm going to be spending 5000 miles in the wilderness of Alaska and Canada, I want to be prepared. Let's get this bumper off. 

Removing the bumper from a 958-generation Porsche Cayenne Diesel is not the work of a moment, but it's relatively straightforward. I had to make things more difficult by parking on unlevel ground and forgetting to bring along my jackstands (don't worry I put the wheels under the rockers in case of jack failure and never put any part of my body underneath), which meant I could only have one wheel off at a time. Remove the wheel liners, remove the headlights, unbolt about 120 individual fasteners, unclip some electrical connectors and the washer fluid line for the headlight washers, and it comes off. Three hours later. 

Installing the control unit for the winch, wiring everything up to the battery, and bolting it down to the winch plate was the easy part. All of the included fasteners worked great, and the instructions were fairly straightforward. After routing the wires up through the radiator shroud into the engine compartment and tucking them away under the engine compartment covers, you would never even know the install wasn't a factory optional component. My usual modus operandi is to half-ass everything and it somehow ends up looking even more cobbled together than it should. This time I took my time, mostly kept my cool, and did a proper job because the car and the components deserve it. 

In order to provide clearance for the winch I was forced to cut out the bumper bracket where the horns mount, so I'll have to find a new place to wire and mount some horns. While I have them out I might upgrade to a louder Hella rally horn, or maybe I'll just leave them out for now because I have never really honked a car horn before anyway. 

With the winch wired and the rope installed, it was time to put the bumper back on. In order to figure out where the fairlead plate mounted on the bumper, I installed a set of long bolts into the mounting bracket and coated their faces with antiseize paste. Then, when I pushed the bumper into place, the paste transferred to the inside face of the bumper so I could drill two pilot holes. This at least gave me a close approximation where the plate mounted. Fire up the death wheel, we're making a hole. I located the plate on the bumper and get an idea of what to cut and what to keep. I ended up freehanding it, and it turned out almost exactly perfect. Just don't look too close.

Putting the bumper back on was significantly easier than removing it, somehow. Buttoned back up and the fairlead plate properly trimmed out, it became instantly clear that this was a worthwhile project. This is one of those projects that doesn't really add anything to the vehicle visually, because it's so well hidden behind the bumper. The only difference you can see is the fairlead and winch hook poking out from behind the bumper, and one of the slats of the grille removed so I can reach in and twist the winch from engaged to free-spool and back. The controller wire also lives under the hood, and the controller itself is tucked away in the glove box away from the elements. 

I threw a set of Borne's seven-inch rally lights on the bumper bar to complete the look, but I think they're going to end up being too big for my use. These sit so tall that the upper part of the light is blocked by the upper bar. The tabs on the bumper bar are also too close together for a quartet of seven-inchers, so I'll probably end up either going to a set of five-inch lights, or some three-by-three square flood lights, I'll have to play around with what I've got and see what I like more. 

My ultimate hope is that I never actually need to use this winch. It's one of those things that you won't need unless you don't have it, you know? Like bringing along a rain jacket on a cloudy day walk. I don't suspect I'll ever be bouncing down trails with serious terrain in this luxury cruiser. It's a workhorse, and it could easily do some pretty rowdy trails, but I'm more of a soft roader, and this rally is largely going to be on groomed dirt roads. It's a just-in-case kind of modification that gives a few bonus points of street cred and it's there to be used when the stuff hits the fan. 

Maybe at some point along the way a fellow competitor will slide off the road and I'll have an opportunity to pull them out of a predicament. In that case I'll be a hero, and it will have all been worth the expense and time. 

In any case, the Cayenne is nearly Arctic Circle ready, and for that I'm thankful. My stoke levels are certainly rising as this event nears.