[Sapientoni]

100% of ball bearings will wear out eventually. It's an inescapable fact. I'm only familiar with the 2006 Cayman S 3.4. Our failure alert noise happened as we had just done a brake job and were letting down the lift. The bearing inner stub on this model is 1 mm smaller than the i.d. of the IMS tube so it was riding on the stub and making god awful noises. I don't know how much clearance/support the earlier models would have. If I had an early, I'd certainly make sure the stub had a minimum clearance to the IMS tube for safety net. At high rpm, there may have been MAYHEM, but my son was able to limp it 6 miles to the home garage. SOoooooo lucky!