Porsche Driving School: The Cars

As the pretty ladies line up, neatly parked one behind the other, one can’t help but sigh at their collective beauty. By themselves, they probably aren’t the most beautiful cars ever created, but in that group – hardtops and convertibles and the famed Porsche targas – it’s difficult to not have a wide grin across your face, and a growing warmth in your heart. And this, before you’ve even opened the door of what has been often labeled as “the most sublime driving machine on the planet”.

For a long time, I have held a manufactured personal opinion, just for the sake of having it, about Porsche’s design. While the rest of the sportscar world has usually chosen to do away with the old and revolutionise design with every new generation, Porsche has decided to stick with an evolution. The result has often been visually less than spectacular cars. The Cayenne and the Panamera have been fantastic and bold new steps in terms of design and sales as far as I am concerned, but have traditionally been looked down upon by Porsche purists – a.k.a. the 911 fanatics.

After seeing the cars in flesh, and spending an entire day experiencing them in their most natural surroundings, I now understand why.

911 Carrera 4S: The very first car, and the one that yours truly got to spend the most time with, was the Carrera 4S. Powered by Porsche’s bigger, gruntier 3.8-litre flat-six engine (like all the other ‘S’ models in the company’s range) the car is propelled by 360PS of power and 415Nm of torque being sent to all four wheels. At the wheel though, what all those numbers translate into is great grip, but what is special is that the grip is not at the cost of feel. The feeling of connection and communication with the tarmac is so built into the chassis that a perceptive driver would find it as easy to know what’s up at the four wheels as he would at speaking his own mother tongue.

911 Carrera Targa 4: The Targa is the cooler, more stylish cousin of the Carrera, with a hard retractable glass roof that tries to mate the benefits of a drop-top with those of a coupe. Given that the car was being used at pace at a racetrack, there was no luxury of actually watching the glass roof recede into the hatch, but thanks once again to the feedback built into the car, one could feel how this Targa was slightly looser around corners as compared to the coupe. This was also the first feel of the lesser-endowed 325PS 3.6-litre engine, through which there was a lack of grunt at corner exits, but very little lost in terms of real corner speeds.

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911 Carrera 4 & 4S Cabriolet: The topless versions of the Carrera were exactly as much fun as the choice of adjective indicates. It also felt much less hardcore, but the benefit was a more organic feel that allowed for carving swoopier, more relaxed and more stylish lines through corners. It would help to mention here that this generation of 911s was the first time where Porsche engineers started off with making the Cabriolet, building in all the necessary rigidity into the frame, figuring out that the once they had established it, the coupe could only get more rigid in its frame flex. Once again, a feel for the design aesthetics could not be achieved at the racetrack with the top down, but the way the cars went more than made up for the black cloth roof.

911 Carrera S: The real mccoy, this rear-wheel drive babe that shone in yellow on the racetrack. A much more relaxed steering feel thanks to no driving force on the front wheels, near perfect weight balance and completely neutral handling – this is the sportscar that I had heard of Porsches to be. Of course, just two wheels getting the power meant that grip was much lower, so much so that the difference in exit speeds out of the Sunsent Bend before laying the power down for the straight was around 15 km/h. That may not work too well in getting great lap times, but so long as it is about having fun, the Carrera 2S is the car to drive around the racetrack, and around most twisties you would want to have a blast on.

Boxster Spyder: The sweetest little thing on the Leipzig track was the Boxster Spyder, Porsche’s latest baby that has all the goods for becoming one of the most loved sportscars of recent times. The car was the weapon of choice for the slalom course marked around the Curva di Lesmo and Bus Stop corners of the Leipzig circuit. With the 324PS flat-six sitting right behind the driver, the sound of the revs building up was surreal as the lightweight (Porsche’s lightest car ever, actually, at just 1,275 kg) shot off the line over the timed lap. When it came to threading the quickest, smoothest lines through the cone gates, the Spyder showed its agility and grunt. Dripping with feedback, perfect steering response and an almost supernatural ability to change direction at will, this was the most fun car to drive, despite the limited time spent with it.

911 GT3 RS: The Porsche Driving School instructors were wise in not handing this scalpel over to us, with its massive 435bhp and handling to more than make up for it. It was the car that we ended our day in nevertheless, piloted by a highly accomplished and clued-in instructor. The drive was an eye opener, not just to the abilities of the car but also to the absolute destruction of my concepts of driving. Real braking points on the track were found to be metres ahead than mine. Where I was cruising on the throttle, I found that crazy speed could be found by rushing in, dabbing on those sharp brakes, and powering out again. At least I can be cocky and say it was probably mostly the car, as the instructor smiles benevolently.

A large variety of cars then – two-wheel drives and four, hard tops and cabriolets, race-prepped monsters to inexpensive sportsters – but there some obviously perceptible factor that binds all Porsches together. The first is the pure feedback and absolute tactility - something that makes even the most inexperienced drivers completely at home at going that bit faster. The other, and more important bit though is the honesty with which they go about doing their business. There’s no unnecessary panache, no big dollop of oomph – just purity of communication and good, solid, mechanical feel through the trickiest of corners that leave it up to the driver to decide what he wants to do next. And while that may not incite whoops of excitement or sweep you off your feet, it most certainly leaves one with a warm, deep and clean affection for these most unique cars.

Click here for a flying lap of the fantastic circuit at the Porsche Werk, Leipzig.