PORSCHE 911 TURBO THE ROAD CARS
It might have taken 45 years, but the iconic Porsche Turbo has matured from a wild widow-maker into the most civilised of everyday supercars
Porsche Turbo. The words may go together as naturally as apple and pie or Jekyll and Hyde, but the Stuttgart firm didn’t get there first, second, or even third. Oldsmobile had launched the Cutlass F-85 Jetfire in 1962. Why the GM brand went to the trouble of fitting a turbo and water/ methanol injection to a small V8 when it had the pick of much bigger ones is a mystery. The Chevy Corvair was next to get the turbo treatment for the Corsa and Monza Spyder and even BMW beat Porsche to it by a year with the handsome little 2002 Turbo, though that lag-prone limited edition was gone almost as soon as it had arrived.
So, Porsche may not have been the first, but it was the first to make it work well and, as is the way of the engineers at Stuttgart, then evolve and improve it. The first 911 Turbo concept was presented at the 1973 Frankfurt show and was essentially a 2.7 RS with a single turbo, a massive rear wing and Turbo decals. Despite the oil price quadrupling in late ’73, the near-production Turbo was shown at Paris in ’74. There were now widened, square-faced arches, wider, deep-dish Fuchs alloys with new Pirelli P7s, and the motor in the back was a 3-litre flat-six churning out 260bhp.
Internally, Porsche had harboured doubts that it would sell, but it was an instant hit in America, partly perhaps because it was related to another turbocharged Porsche, the awesome 1100bhp 917/30 that had dominated the 1973 CanAm series in the hands of Mark Donohue.
Today there are more powerful hot hatches but back then 260bhp was a decent chunk of power (a Ferrari 308 had 255bhp and much less torque). There were some complimentary reports in the press, but the Turbo also rapidly acquired a bit of a reputation as a ‘widow-maker’. It’s not hard to see why: adding more power and weight to the tail of a car that already had a reputation for spinning out when the rear grip was exceeded didn’t look like the best of ideas. Especially as the power came in with a bit of a rush.
Was it a scary car? It certainly had its challenges, the main one being getting the power you wanted when you wanted it. Or, more pertinently, getting it when you didn’t want it, that is in the middle of a wet corner. Despite the uplift to 3.0 litres there was still a lot of throttle lag, not helped by the early cars having space for just four gears inside their beefed-up gearboxes. I only drove one in the dry, and treated it with respect, gunning it mostly in a straight line, but even then I could see how it could bite.
I could also appreciate how, at launch, it must have offered a thrillingly different experience to the delicate, finely honed interplay of power and handling that cars such as the 2.7 RS had delivered. The rush of turbocharged power was exciting 20 years later so must have been mindblowing at the time. The 964 generation Turbo evolved the theme, ultimately mating a five-speed ’box with 376bhp in the Turbo S, but a revolution and a revelation was coming.
In 1995 Porsche launched the 993 Turbo with twin turbos, 408bhp and four-wheel drive. A not dissimilar specification to the 959, the 911 that had been fashioned around mid-’80s Group B regs. Yet while the 993 wasn’t nearly as sophisticated in its drivetrain or suspension, that didn’t matter because it was a phenomenally effective road car.
The launch was in the South of France and I can still recall coming across an inviting corner that I reckoned would be ideal for the action shots. The road was warm, the lowprofile Michelins were up to temperature and I dropped a gear and attacked the corner. It was as if the car was magnetised to the road. The lateral g-force built to such a level that mid-turn the photographer’s Billingham camera bag, which he’d wedged into one of the rear buckets, levered itself upright against the transmission tunnel and then rolled over it, hitting the other side of the car with a crash of filters and film canisters that sounded like a dropped tea service.
Like previous Turbos, the 993 had wider bodywork and a ‘whale tail’ spoiler, here packed with intercoolers. In my view it was the best-looking 993. Boost was still set at 0.8bar but that 408bhp was not only very accessible, it was also very exploitable. It got the 1500kg Turbo to 60mph in under 4.5sec and pushed it on to 180mph, which I unofficially verified on a two-lane straight that stretched to the shimmering horizon.
In the last year of 993 Turbo production, Porsche made a limited-run, 450bhp Turbo S. It was the last hurrah of the aircooled Turbo and answered the question: ‘How much more power can the 993 Turbo handle?’ It was dizzyingly fast in a straight line, pinning you firmly to your tombstone-shaped seat, and on full boost out of a second-gear corner it would be three-wheel drive, the inside front wheel hanging free like that of an early 911 racer.
It’s taken enthusiasts a long time to warm to the stepchange that was the 996. Gone was Butzi’s original, narrow 911 body and the air-cooled flat-six. The 996 Turbo moved the game on in many respects, exploiting the new rear ‘Lightweight Stable Axle’ with even wider tracks, and adding an active whale tail plus, of course, a new, water-cooled twinturbo flat-six.
Power had risen modestly to 420bhp and was easier to exploit; the new bi-turbo flatsix drove more like a big-capacity, naturally aspirated engine. Arguably, it fitted the Turbo’s GT brief better than ever before but it lacked some of the excitement, some of the tactility and thrills of earlier models. What some saw as impressive competence and accessibility was for others aloofness and lack of engagement.
There was always something of the grand tourer about the Turbo, not in comparison with rival sports cars – compared with them the Turbo was still a remarkably compact
(yet accommodating) and very sporty coupé – but it wasn’t as sharp as other 911s. Sure, turbo lag was barely an issue now, but response was soft when judged against naturally aspirated 911s such as the GT3 and RS, which were also lighter and blessed with crisper steering response, too. The Turbo was playing out its role in the range as the less visceral, less demanding but still astonishingly fast model, and, despite being fully equipped, it was still capable of 0-60mph in the mid-3s and over 200mph.
With each generation, the 911 Turbo got closer to the technical sophistication of its grandaddy, the 959. The 997 Turbo bested the 959’s 450bhp, boasting 472bhp with variable vane turbochargers for a more even spread of torque, plus active dampers and an active four-wheel drive system. Initially it felt almost too relaxed, too much the cruiser, but when you sharpened your inputs, the 997 pushed back, snapping to attention in remarkable fashion. The limits of the 993 Turbo had felt astonishing but the 997’s were even higher.
During the launch in Portugal, Andrew Davies, boss of Porsche GB PR, rang and said: ‘If you can make the scheduled afternoon rendezvous, I promise you won’t regret it.’ So we did and discovered that Walter Röhrl was giving rides on a bit of closed, single-track road. Basically, it was a special stage and Walter, despite the lack of overalls and helmet, was on it. It was an incredible demonstration of the new Turbo’s abilities and his skill. From the start-line, he got to fourth before the first corner and, just as I went for the imaginary brake pedal, he shifted into fifth. It was a master class; the lines he’d left from previous runs, right at the edge of the track, were clustered together within three, maybe four inches. Incredible. The car took it in its stride.
Then, in 2008, the Nissan GT-R came along and trashed the 911 Turbo’s Nordschleife lap time. Porsche wouldn’t let it lie. It conducted its own tests with a GT-R and showed it wasn’t nearly as fast as Nissan claimed, but their engineering response was the 997.2 Turbo, a mid-cycle refresh that resulted in a much harder-edged Turbo. It retained all the usual equipment and refinements but had dynamics that felt appropriate for the more focused GT2 (which is what you get if you cross a Turbo and an RS). Power was up to 493bhp from a 3.8-litre flat-six and the six-speed manual I tested hit 60mph in just 3.2sec and 100mph in 7.3sec… in the wet! But it didn’t offer the stand-easy comfort of the previous model.
And then came the 991. Another watershed, the 991 of 2014 was dynamically so well developed that it didn’t feel like the engine was rear-mounted. You could say that this was what Porsche had always been working towards – all the advantages of the layout without the compromises – but the 991 lost some of the magic in the process.
The loss of character and engagement is a complaint levelled at every new 911, of course, but the new model really did lack steering feel because of its new electric power steering (EPAS). It has taken a few years of development to get that back but the Turbo and other very-high-performance 911s were a chunk better right away because they had rear-steer. Right from launch you could have a Turbo S, with power raised from the regular Turbo’s 513bhp to a lung-squeezing 552bhp, and it was good for 0-62mph (100kph) in a claimed 3.1sec. Some tests nailed 60mph in just 2.6sec, which is virtually Veyron fast. There was no manual option, however; it was almost as if having a gear lever and clutch would have introduced an unwanted variable, hampering the car from optimising itself.
Under the skin, the 991 Turbo made the 959 look simple: besides the 552bhp, 3.8-litre flat-six there was an evolution of the four-wheel drive with torque vectoring, active anti-roll bars and engine mounts, adaptive aero, a seven-speed dual-clutch gearbox and launch control. Plus, as ever, despite the incredibly dense packaging at the rear (slice off a rear corner diagonally and the section revealed would look like a five-bird roast), the robustness of the new Turbo wasn’t in doubt. There’s a water-cooled front differential that must have helped when Road
& Track made 50 consecutive launch-control starts to 100mph, all of them sub-3sec to 60mph runs, with no issue.
The Turbo evolved from a scary car into an all-weather supercar, with huge, exploitable performance. It’s never been the sharpest or most engaging 911 because turbocharging dampens intake noise and throttle response. The irony is that today every new 911 bar the GT3 and GT3 RS is turbocharged; light pressure turbos are the modern way of having big performance with small emissions. But these are turbos with a small ‘t’. There is only one Porsche Turbo. End