Features
Back to Library >
Our Cars: Porsche 911 Carrera farewell
2 years ago
Frankel is going to miss the 911's analogue tachometer
Eight years ago I ran another 911 as a long termer. It was of course a 991 and it came in Carrera S spec, with a few added goodies, which included active engine mounts, active anti-roll bars and rear-wheel steering, so actually a sight more electronically sophisticated than the base Carrera I’ve been living with of late. And there is nothing on or about that car that I preferred to this one. Fine car though the 991 is, like for like a 992 is just a better product and, really, it would be strange were that not the case.
Now make the argument to me that when the history of the 911 is written the second generation of the 997 will be remembered more fondly than the first of the 992, and you’d get much less push back. But that was a literally entirely different product from a different era and you’re not really comparing like with like.
And if I may continue in Mystic Meg vein for just a minute, if I have any fear for the 911 in the future, it is that as a concept it seems so wholly unsuited to the whole EV thing (a refrigerator motor just isn’t going to cut it, rear-mounted or otherwise) that when its tale is finally told, it will be the 992 that will be seen as, if not the greatest to wear the badge, then certainly the best.
"I always considered the ‘standard’ 991 to be the 911 for people who didn’t want a 911. In other words those who loved the idea of a 911 more than the reality. It looked like a 911 alright, but you had to drive it in a way few attracted to the car for its image ever would before it’d behave like one"
It’s how it looks to me. Because far from being a bit too clever for its own clogs, the 992 has an ability as a pure driver’s car missing from its predecessor. It may sound like damning with faint damning, but I always considered the ‘standard’ 991 to be the 911 for people who didn’t want a 911. In other words those who loved the idea of a 911 more than the reality. It looked like a 911 alright, but you had to drive it in a way few attracted to the car for its image ever would before it’d behave like one. It was all there to be sure, but it took a great deal of finding. Since the first time I drove one back in 2019, I’ve always found 992s to be just more accessible: more fun, less effort.
Yet it does all the other stuff too. And of course I spent far more of my time behind the wheel driving it like most people drive most cars all of the time, and then the excellence of its driving position, seats as good as in any non-GT 911 I’ve driven, the visibility and a very un-911 ability to do over 35mpg and therefore 400 miles on a tank of unleaded was as compelling as ever.
But it did go wrong – sort of. A yellow engine light came on, Porsche wanted to look at it and decided all was fine and it was down to a misunderstanding between engine and gearbox. But it came back on soon after I got it back, and on it stayed for the duration. The car never ran less than perfectly. There was also a weird wind rustle coming from the nearside top of the bonnet which appeared at precisely 48mph and disappeared at 52mph. Had this been my own car into which I’d just dropped £100k hard earned, I’d have chucked it back at the dealer and asked not to see it again until permanently fixed.
“It is here that you learn a few things, one being that even with all that extra power and grip, the actual lap speed between the two is sufficiently close for a decent driver in a Carrera to easily keep pace with a merely adequate pedaller in a GTS”
Really however, this report is not about such details. We ran the car to answer a specific question, namely, is an entry level 911 worthy of the title, or is it merely the car you buy because you can’t afford the 911 you really want? And now it seems ludicrous even to have asked it.
The day it went back it was loaded into a truck from which had recently been delivered another brand new 911 Carrera, this one a second-generation car in which I was to spend a couple of weeks, and I was immediately reminded of the first time I’d driven one, which was last May at the launch of the new hybridised GTS. Porsche just wheeled out a few new Carreras for us to hoon around a track, largely because it could.
And I wondered then as I do now whether it was such a great idea to do so. Because what I discovered and reported at the time was this: ‘It is here that you learn a few things, one being that even with all that extra power and grip, the actual lap speed between the two is sufficiently close for a decent driver in a Carrera to easily keep pace with a merely adequate pedaller in a GTS. And you learn too that while Porsche has worked wonders with this engine, not even its engineers can defy physical law. And on narrower tyres while carrying 80 fewer kilograms from apex to apex the Carrera was more agile and had better feel too. The GTS was more objectively impressive but actually given one more lap, I’d take the Carrera: it’s just a little more fun to drive.’
It’s no less so on the road. To be honest, save the improved dial layout (though I’ll miss the analogue tachometer), I didn’t really notice a huge difference between the generations, and certainly not the apparent 10bhp rise in power thanks to the use of previous gen GTS turbos. Nor, thankfully, did I need the facility provided by its bigger brakes. But I do wish they’d kept the starter on a switch rather than a button and I suddenly realised when it started bonging at me for lining up a corner that the white 911 was probably the last press car I’ll ever drive whose default setting wasn’t to think it was a better driver than me. Not that that’s Porsche’s fault.
So the answer to the question is simple and easy. Is a base Carrera with less than a grand’s worth of options still a proper 911? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. I’ll go further – because it’s light and simple, has just enough of what you need and very little of what you don’t, it fits my image, my ideal even, of what a 911 should be. In short it’s one of my favourite 911s, certainly of the last 15 years.
And if I had the money and didn’t need to drive other stuff, I’d be on the configurator now: Gentian blue, black leather and really very little else. Perfect.
