Porsche 911 Carrera S
Welcome to a spin class that’ll leave you breathless, with laughter
Happy hooning on a track
This is not something I’ve had cause to say in any test for many years now, let alone a longterm test, but I have spun the 911. Several times, in fact. And these were not gentle semi-rotations resulting in unscheduled halts facing in something other than the desired direction. These were proper, extravagant pirouettes that left its driver and my hapless passenger sufficiently disorientated to be barely able to discern which way was up, let alone which way we should have been heading. Were it not for the laughter inside, an entirely undamaged car and the fact that I knew a total loss of control to be an absolutely inevitable consequence of pre-planned actions, I might even have been a bit concerned.
In fact, it was just one of the more memorable moments from a morning spent at the Porsche Driving Centre, part of the free introductory course offered to anyone who buys a brandnew Porsche or, indeed, manages to second a press car for a few months for long-term test purposes.
Would I do it were this actually my car? In a heartbeat. Not only is it good fun, but it can also teach new things even to gnarled old hacks who think they’ve forgotten more about 911s than most will ever know. For instance, if you’re in ‘Drive’ and momentarily kick the throttle, it’ll select a lower gear; kick harder and it’ll drop a couple; really stab it and it’ll choose the lowest viable ratio in the ’box. Apparently, all PDK ’boxes have done this for years but I never knew.
But the real appeal to me is that you’re not part of a driving school where you all follow each other around doing preset manoeuvres: you’re allocated an instructor and can do whatever you most want. So you can learn how the controls work, see how the stability systems function, hare around the track or, as I did, head to the infamous kicker plate – which wrenches the car’s back end loose in a random direction every time you cross it – and see at what speed you can hold the slide. I found it easy at 25mph, tricky at 27mph and increasingly uncontrollable thereafter. I never held a slide induced at 30mph.
As for the 911, it has slipped and slid very nicely into my life. More on that next time around.