She’s called Hebe for a reason, and not because she’s the Greek Goddess of Youth, though after a while in the company of her timeless charms and abilities I did start to wonder. No, it’s the numberplate: HBY. She – and I will continue to call her such because she has a girl’s name, even though I tend to wince when others use the same pronoun for their cars – is a 2010 Porsche 911 GT3 RS, second generation of course, and is probably the most famous car on any British press fleet.
Now there are other cars on other fleets with far greater claims to fame – Sir Henry Birkin’s 1930 Le Mans ‘Blower’ which sits on Bentley’s historic fleet being perhaps the most obvious example – but Hebe is not like that. I have some idea of how long is the list of people authorised to drive the world’s most valuable Bentley and I expect you could count them on the fingers of one hand without troubling your thumb. By contrast Hebe is a working girl, in the most positive sense of the term, and if you are a journalist known and trusted by Porsche, and you have a decent idea of what you’d like to do with her, she will be made available, in the same way as might a Macan.
My plan was to live with her for precisely one month. It’s not an original idea, indeed it first occurred to me about 35 years ago that getting to know a car over a decent amount of time would allow a journalist to understand it better than would ever be possible on a launch or with a loan of a few days, without jumping through all the hoops required to secure it for a traditional long-term loan. So we ran a few such stories back in the day. I remember a particularly joyous month at the helm of a red 1.9-litre Peugeot 205 GTI. But the idea now had added depth and texture because my plan for this series is to feature not just brand new cars but, as seen here, some old favourites as well.
