My belief on this one is that it must be a real pain at the factory keeping the tooling for the 986/996 series going alongside the 987/997 - I'm sure the production engineers are desperate to get the 996 production out of the way for many reasons; floorspace, logistics and potential for error being but a few.

As has already been said on this forum, Porsche has had the time and the money this time around to plan and design the production process properly, and not being budget-constrained (as they surely were with the 996), no doubt they've been able to work on many 997 variants simultaneously, which is bound to be more efficient anyhow.

Can't wait to see the Turbo ... how quickly it appears will I guess depend on how much it shares in common in terms of tooling and components with the existing 987/997 variants.