PORSCHE 911 
The Porsche 911 must be one of the world’s best adverts for the power of continuous product improvement. Through nearly half a century of refinement since it was conceived as a larger, more comfortable successor to the Porsche 356 and was powered by a 2.0-litre, 128bhp flat six engine, this effervescent sports car has kept up with the standards of the market’s freshest performance machinery. Technologies such as fuel injection, turbocharging, four-wheel drive and, most famously, moving from air to water cooling have been integrated. All the while, its legendary and utterly beguiling motive character has survived undimmed.
But never has the 911 taken such a significant leap as the one that delivered it from ‘997’ to this-generation, the ‘991’. With 90 per cent of the car’s mechanical ingredients new or improved, this 911 features completely new axle dimensions, electromechanical power steering, a downsized engine, a construction richer in aluminium than ever before and the passenger car’s first seven-speed manual gearbox.
Even though it’s substantially new, a casual observer isn’t going to mistake this car for anything other than a Porsche 911. Its shape is now so easily recognisable that it has become an icon.
However, in its latest iteration Germany’s most famous automotive export has grown by 56mm in overall length, 100mm in wheelbase and 46mm at the front track over its predecessor.
If you understand basic physics, you need know very little of this Porsche’s dynamic backstory to work out why. With a longitudinal engine and gearbox hung out behind its rear wheels, the 911 has always been fundamentally inclined towards two idiosyncratic behavioural problems: power understeer and body pitch. For lever, fulcrum and load, think body, rear axle and engine. With more space between both the axles and the individual front wheels, both key dynamic challenges have been addressed here.
Aluminium has been used in place of steel throughout a great deal of the new 911’s construction. On the ‘991’, almost all of the exterior body panels are aluminium and most of the body-in-white, except in areas such as the car’s pillars, where high compression strength is required.
As a result, on the coupé there’s like-for-like weight saving of around 45kg over its predecessor (depending on which model you are driving and what extras and are fitted), and a 20 per cent improvement in torsional rigidity.
The cabriolet is a few millimetres lower than than the coupé, but it’s so fractionally different to be almost inconsequential. Porsche also claims a similar weight saving over its drop-top predecessor of 45kg, although its actual kerbweight is inevitably higher (around 50kg) as a result of all the associated strengthening. The torsional rigidity of the drop-top is said by Porsche to have improved by 18 per cent over that of its predecessor.
In design terms, the main head-turning feature of the cabriolet is the all-new ‘panel bow top’ roof, the frame of which is constructed from fabric and composite plastic and sits on a frame made of magnesium and aluminium.
This new roof has several packaging benefits, not least that Porsche has been able the follow the profile of the coupé’s roofline more closely than it could with the old-style multi-layered fabric structure. It drops in 13 seconds.
Porsche 911 cabins have, over the generations, been if not good then good enough. The car’s 2+2 seating has made everyday usability a long-serving trump card, but there’s now so much more to recommend this driving environment. Porsche can, at last, be congratulated for making its sporting icon as comfortable and well appointed as almost any £70k sports coupé on the market.
Whether you’re in the coupé or cabriolet, your view forward is framed by a high scuttle and a wide plateau of a dashboard. The sense of intimacy with your passenger has been reduced a little by greater interior width, and by a dividing centre console that rises as it flows forward to meet the fascia’s centre stack.
Like every other control panel in the new 911, that centre stack is fitted with neat, aluminium-accented switchgear arranged in logical clusters. There are no afterthoughts here and nothing haphazard or even remotely out of place. Tactile material quality and haptic feedback are also first-rate.
You’ll find warmer and more ostentatious cabin treatments in other sports cars, it’s true, but this one remains slavishly devoted to function, namely, the business of driving, hence the large central tacho and the inclusion of both oil and water temperature gauges. But 911 devotees wouldn’t have it any other way.
Space for passengers in both the front and rear seats ought to have been improved, given the car’s longer wheelbase. And yet maximum head and legroom measurements in the new 991 911 are, according to our measurements, as close to those of the 997 coupé to make for no meaningful improvement to overall accommodation. The rear chairs remain for children only, and then only if those in the front seats are prepared to give up some legroom.
Meanwhile, the cabriolet features a wind deflector that can be deployed from the cockpit, so there’s no faffing around trying to fit a deflector that lives in the boot. It can’t eliminate all wind noise and buffeting but the reduction in the amount of cockpit ‘swirl’ with the deflector raised is dramatic.
Power for the entry-level Carrera model comes from Porsche's new 3.4-litre flat six. It has a shorter stroke than the outgoing 3.6 and aluminium camshaft positioners contribute to a greater peak rpm. Peak torque of 288lb ft is the same as before, but it arrives more than 1000rpm higher on the tacho than from the 3.6. Peak power of 345bhp eclipses that of the base 997 by 5bhp, but doesn’t turn up until 7400rpm. The new 911’s redline is 7800rpm.
However, this 3.4 can seem a little unenergetic and run-of-the-mill at first, pulling matter-of-factly through the low rev range. But get the crankshaft spinning more quickly and the fireworks materialise.
At 4500rpm there’s a pleasing additional hit of potency, which ramps up again at 5600rpm as the engine passes peak torque. Then, from 6000rpm, Porsche’s flat six serves up a final impressive layer of sound and fury, with enough power for it feel exciting and effortlessly fast, but always manageable and never savage or unruly.
Despite the Carrera S holding on to what is essentially the same 3.8-litre six-cylinder engine as the old model, Porsche has held true to 911 tradition by raising the output. Power climbs by 14bhp to a new peak of 394bhp at 7400rpm, in the process taking its specific output beyond 100bhp per litre. Torque also improves by 13lb ft to 234lb ft at 5600rpm. With the drop in weight figured in, the bump in reserves provides for a 16bhp per tonne increase in the vital power-to-weight ratio at 282bhp per tonne.
The detail changes Porsche has made to the engine give the new Carrera S a gutsier feel across a wider range of revs; it might lack the sheer intensity of some of the engines used by its supercar rivals, but the evergreen flat six remains as stirring as ever.
Unlike the engine, the new 911's gearbox is all new and rather special, too. Replacing the old six-speed manual is the first ever seven-speed manual to make its way into a series production road car.
Based around the seven-speed PDK gearbox, the ground-breaking manual uses a mechanical lock-out to stop you from inadvertently shifting into seventh. The new top gear can only be selected via fifth or sixth and in truth is best considered only for long-distance cruising. In practice it works reasonably well, although if you’re really pressing on it can leave you fishing around a bit in the gate. Furthermore, the shift action is good but not great.
Oddly, that leaves the buyer with a tough choice: the fiddly seven-speed manual that you’ll no doubt get used to with time, and which is undeniably a fraction more engaging, or the ultra-slick PDK system that lacks the level of involvement but is so crisp and so precise that it is a pleasure to use even when you’re hacking along.
If the cabriolet lacks quite the same level of driver engagement as the closed-topped version, it makes up for it with its assault on the senses when you’ve got the roof down. The 394bhp is deployed in smooth waves and, with maximum power so high in the rev range, you sometimes wonder if you’ll ever scale the peak of it. 
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