The End, And The Beginning, Of The Porsche Turbo

So. They finally did it, didn't they?

Porsche followed the lead of Ferrari (with either the California T or 208GTS, depending on your awareness of history) and Ford (with the Fiesta EcoBoost, of course) by making the entry-level 911 a small-displacement turbo. It had to happen, because in its successful quest to become primarily a manufacturer of unibody "trucks" Porsche became too large to reasonably plead an indulgence, er, exemption from Europe's state religion of carbon-emissions laws. By the way, the next time you're reading about the sale of indulgences and all of the other ridiculous behavior practiced by Christian Europe six hundred years ago and you're feeling very smug about living in era where reason holds sway over craven superstition, take a nice long look at this and tell me how much difference you truly see between now and the era of Leo X.

Will Porsche's switch to smaller, force-fed engines counterbalance even an hour of one region of China's use of coal for power? It's best not to think too much about that. Could Porsche accomplish a similar amount of carbon-production reduction by changing the engines in the Macan and Cayenne, perhaps giving them all ludicrous-pressure four bangers like the one in the AMG CLA 45 and therefore leaving the naturally-aspirated sports cars alone? We really don't want to think about that. It would be like a husband wondering why his wife comes to bed in curlers but insists on a manicure before his brother stops by for dinner. Could it be that he's no longer the most important member of the family?

This is not a train that we, the occasional Porsche buyers of America, can stop. And it especially is not a train that you, the person from the Internet who has never bought a Porsche but plans on picking up a Carrera G50 some time in the next ten years if the prices come back down, can stop. All we can do is look back at a few great Porsche Turbos and Monday-morning quarterback Porsche's new product line.

Let's do that, shall we?

Perhaps the saddest thing about the new lineup is that it marks the official end of the "turbo magic". Strictly speaking, it's been a very long time since a 911 Turbo was the coolest car money could buy — I have to think that the arrival of the Ferrari F355 put a nail in that particular coffin twenty-one years ago, assuming the Corvette ZR1 didn't do it in 1989 — but the lower-case italic turbo logo stayed ice cold long after the cars to which it was attached lost alpha status. For nearly forty years, ownership of a Porsche Turbo was an unmistakable statement of success, taste, and masculinity, although the various tuners and the 996 Turbo S Tip Cab did a fair amount of damage to the automatic validity of those last two qualities. I'd personally love to own a 911 Turbo and I wish I'd bought a 1996 Turbo instead of a 1995 Carrera back in 2001 when the difference in the money wasn't a hundred grand like it is today.

Regardless, "Porsche Turbo" has always meant something, and here are the reasons why. We'll leave the race cars out because racing is not real life and that's why the Plymouth Neon was not the finest compact sedan of the Nineties. Without further ado:

1975 Turbo Carrera 3.0
Nominally speaking, this was a three-liter turbocharged six with about 20 percent more power than the naturally-aspirated Carrera preceding it. Sound familiar? What made the first 911 Turbo such a big deal was simply this: it was meant for the road. It was luxury-appointed, designed for the Autobahn instead of the racetracks that had inspired its Carrera predecessors. Just kidding. What really made it a big deal was Porsche's unwillingness to certify it for the United States in any kind of volume until 1986. Mix that in with a few stories of Turbos exiting corners backwards on their Pirelli Cintuartos and poof! there's the legend.

1988 944 Turbo S Silver Rose
Last year, I lived my childhood dream of racing a 944 Turbo and it totally lived up to my expectations. The truth is that, judged solely on contemporaneous expectations, the 944 Turbo is probably the greatest Porsche ever built. It was wickedly fast and superbly sure-footed at speed. It was comfortable and quiet and stylish and got decent mileage and carried a lot of cargo. It liked to eat Ferraris and Corvettes for lunch, or so I was told. It was probably the best performance-for-dollar deal Zuffenhausen ever offered.

The best of them was the Silver Rose 1988 Turbo S. It had 247 horsepower delivered like the proverbial hammer to the forehead. The interior was as good as those cars ever got, meaning better than a 911. There was plenty of tire width on stunning polished wheels. The plain Turbo of the following year got most of the improvements but it wasn't as cool as the debut Silver Rose model. It took Porsche fifteen years to come up with a non-911 that was actually faster; that car was the Cayman S, good used examples of which can be had for less than what you'll pay for an original-condition '88 Silver Rose.

1996 993 Turbo
The 1994 911 Turbo 3.6 was a great car in a straight line but it was simply another incremental improvement. The 993 Turbo was, by contrast, a rethinking of the Porsche Turbo concept that also returned to the core idea of the most usable high-performance road car possible. It was fast. It was easy to drive. It looked stunning. The market has spoken on this one and a low-mileage example is worth more than a brand-new GT3 or 991 Turbo. There's nothing else to say.

2011 GT2RS
My time behind the wheel of an 800-horsepower tuned 997.1 GT2 was enough to convince me that here, finally, was a car to make all the turbo hoopla a reality. Porsche's take on the same idea, the center-lock-wheel, lightened-and-stiffened, 620-horsepower GT2RS, probably wasn't quite as scary but it was certainly the most powerful 911 variant to ever leave a showroom in stock form. If the 993 Turbo was the Last Real 911(tm), then the GT2RS was the Last Real-Ish 911(also tm).

* * *The new 911 Carrera turbo will not be called the 911 Turbo Carrera. Just as well. We'd expect it to be something that it wasn't. In much the same way that "Carrera" started off meaning "the best 911″ but ended up meaning "the cheapest 911″, adding "turbo" to the badging would only reinforce the fall from grace of forced-air Porsches. Instead, for the near future the best 911 will be the only one without a turbocharger. It's called "GT3RS", and its claim to fame will be that it makes its power the old-fashioned way. Just like a 1969 911T. Which never meant "turbo", obviously. But it also never meant "targa". Which just goes to show that Porsche likes to keep us guessing, doesn't it?

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