BOULDER DASH
Just days before the US lockdown, a dusty desert run in the new Porsche 911 Turbo S
Three miles into the drive I felt confident we’d make it. Five miles in I saw the squad of ATVs leaping towards us, stars and stripes flags flapping in the wind off the tips of CB whip aerials, buzz-cut, square-jawed, sunburnt drivers and passengers in sweat-blotched wife-beaters and mirror shades listening to deafening, distorted death metal. Now I wasn’t so sure.
I looked at Jamie, the photographer who had suggested this rippled sand dune of a dirt road would be a brilliant place to bring the Carmine Red 205mph 641bhp Turbo S – yeah, the one with the optionally lowered Sport chassis – because “literally no one has ever brought a 911 this far before, or will again…” and mentally kicked myself for being so stupid.
It wasn’t just that we might get stuck, which with every extra metre seemed like a racing certainty. It was also that there was zero chance of getting any assistance. Not only because we were about to be beached in the middle of a sand farm – and potentially set upon by a pack of feral survivalists – but also, there simply weren’t any breakdown trucks, or anything else, for thousands of miles.
Why? Because, little did we know, the whole of the US was about to be locked down to curb the spread of the pandemic. To understand how we could be so massively thick – or even more than usual – you have to understand the full circumstances. Two days before the coronavirus social distancing advisory was issued, the new 992 Turbo S arrived at my door.
I took this as a sign – and a challenge. If the lockdown did happen and this was going to be the only car I had to live out my days with, would it be enough? As in, suitably versatile to meet all my motoring needs. Here was a chance to test the theory we all blather on about – a 911 is all the car you’ll ever need – with a small chance that it might actually be for real.
What that theory forgets to qualify is what type of driving each of us might do. In my case, living between Los Angeles and the desert, I have some pretty wide-ranging requirements which vary from regularly carrying all sorts of unreasonably large baggage – human and otherwise – to needing to drive to places which are, shall we say, a little way off the beaten track. So it’s quite a tough remit.
And, to add to the task, today we are also going in search of one of California’s greatest social distancers, and one of the Porsche’s former countrymen, a man by the name of Frank Critzer. Frank passed away decades ago, but he left behind a fascinating legacy which is by design hard to get to and which we are hoping to get a close up view of today.
But we’ll get to that later. Right now I’ve just reached cruising speed in the Turbo S, leaving the rapidly emptying skyscrapers of downtown LA as a rapidly receding dot in the rear-view mirror. Our speed is a multiple of the speed limit, but that multiple may or may not be one.
This new 992’s top speed might be the same as the previous 991 version, but it’s packing an extra 69bhp and 37lb ft so, in Sport or Sport Plus modes, it transitions from rest to max much faster. Like a boat going over Niagara Falls, it accelerates exponentially, apparently without pause, to any speed you like up to 205mph. All with substantially less drama than its forebear.
There’s the same muted, breathy roar from the engine, but much less NVH, less fidget from the steering, and any sense of being
“THE TURBO S IS THE CONTINENT CRUSHER OF THE 911 RANGE”
anything other than totally unruffled. Which is exactly what Porsche was aiming for with this car. The Turbo S is the continent crusher of the 911 range. It’s not meant to be the most raw and focused – that’s the reserve of the GT cars from the brand’s motorsport division in Flacht.
It’s been designed to deliver two humans and their luggage to a point on the map in the fastest, most comfortable and secure way possible. It doesn’t really matter what the weather or the geography is doing outside, the Turbo S, with its AWD, multi-mode system, which now features a new Wet setting, hurls you there in a bubble of unstressed calm. So if I was speeding, don’t blame me. Blame the Turbo S…
But don’t think the car has gone soft on us. Because it hasn’t. While it lacks some of the traditional 911 feedback, it’s gained a new level of speed and control. Turning off the freeway – see how fast that was... we’re already almost there – I give the standard carbon ceramics, clamped by 10-piston calipers at the front, a squeeze. It’s the first time I’ve touched them on this whole traffic-free journey.
Then, with no one about, I get into the throttle and watch the ball in the g meter slide off the right-hand side of the scale as I squash my right foot to the floor. The front end sticks and we ricochet very satisfyingly up into the mountains. I catch sight of the exit speed and immediately my brain rejects it. That’s just not possible in a car weighing 1,640kg on treaded all-season tyres. Is it? Apparently so.
Having collected the photographer and ticked off the Turbo
S’s load-carrying abilities – if a car can carry a photographer’s collection of odd-sized equipment, it is by definition a practical vehicle – the plan is not to head straight to Herr Critzer’s place, but to first have a quick tour up to Big Bear, at 2,180m.
A lot of Angelenos have houses up there in the ski resort and next to the lake, so we’re sure plenty will escape up there as soon as they
can. But we are not visiting to do a social study, it’s the extraordinary roads up there that are the draw.
With a very austere looking cement works on one side of the mountain and local traffic on the other, the roads are usually filled with slow-moving vehicles. So it’s an object lesson in frustration, especially in a Turbo S. But today we are almost the only ones here. And, frankly, I couldn’t imagine anywhere much better to drive right now.
It’s not as exquisitely well-surfaced as the Hakone Turnpike outside Tokyo. And it might not have all the Gallic charm of the Route Napoleon in Provence. But this stretch of road has it all. Sequences of hairpins, wide open, low angle turns and views that are so good you almost can’t keep your eyes on the road. Almost.
It’s on a road like this that you might start to wish you had added the Lightweight Package to your Turbo S. This not only sheds 30kg through swapping out the electric seats for buckets, chucking out the rear perches and using lightweight glass, it also adds sport suspension and a lighter, noisier exhaust. So you win back some of the 911 character, get even more involved.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the ‘standard’ Turbo S, which is already making me gasp at its towering abilities. But I’d still be tempted, very tempted, to tick that box. Totally understand why you wouldn’t, though. Especially if it was your only car.
With the Turbo S’s active aero back in semi-sensible mode – this 992 version has an advanced version of the pneumatic front dam and the rear wing now acts as an air brake when required
– we decide to do a lap of the town before heading back to our main mission. There’s not much to see other than several hundred shuttered houses staring blankly out over the lake, the one highlight being an off-road garage selling Pinzgauers and tricked out Hummers – and a lone UK-spec Ford Capri.
As fun as each of those would be on the right day, today it’s all about the Turbo S, so we tip-toe out of town and then blaze back down the mountain, a tiny Carmine Red smear on the vast alpine landscape. I’m still not a huge fan of the optional active steering, it isn’t quite as linear as I’d like, so you find yourself slightly under or over-correcting, but I’m starting to get used to it.
Likewise the power and speed. You hit top speed in sixth gear, with seventh and eighth there purely to meet emissions, economy and noise goals. The default Normal drive mode heads for the highest gear possible, which doesn’t always show off the 3.8-litre twin-turbo engine, especially when cruising below 2,000rpm. Much better to keep the car in Sport which solves any trace of hesitancy.
And talking of hesitating… when we get to the turn-off that will take us to the Critzer residence, the road dissolves into a dirt track.
I look at Jamie and ask if this is worth the risk. Get a puncture and it’s a long way to the nearest garage, which is shut anyway. Oh, and it’s Sunday, so everything else that might be open is closed, too.
But we’ve come this far and, to be fair, a lot of these roads in the high desert aren’t tarmacked and they are fine. If it was my only car I would. So we do. And, for the first few turns, it is a breeze. A slow, steady breeze, eyes straining to pick out any lumps and bumps. But it’s not like we are going to be on this for miles, right Jamie?
Without looking up from his phone Jamie announces that we have six miles of this to cover before we get there. That should have been my cue to turn around but, being an idiot, I decided to press on. I mean, how bad could it be?
About a mile further on, we found out. The once-smooth track had turned into a heavily corrugated sand wash. If we stopped we’d never get started again, AWD with clever torque vectoring or not.
Then we stopped. Had to. The trail ahead was filled with that pack of ATVs and there was only room for one-way traffic. If we hadn’t pulled over, they’d have used our £155k+ Porsche as a ramp to get some air. “Right, that’s it,” I thought, as the side by sides filed past in a blur of noise and sand spray. “We’re properly stuck now.”
But we weren’t. Somewhere, somehow, deep inside the Porsche’s brain, there was a survival fix even for this absurd situation. I just gently pushed the throttle and the car edged forward with no fuss. Hire cars would have got stuck, but not a 205mph Turbo S. I was marvelling in disbelief at this fact so much I almost forgot what we were here for. Until we turned the corner and there it was: Giant Rock.
Or ‘home’ as Frank Critzer used to call it. Originally discovered and used as a holy sanctuary by Native Americans, Critzer, a mining prospector and Essex Super Six driver who clearly enjoyed his own company almost exclusively, decided to create a squat under the rock – the biggest freestanding one in the world – in the early Thirties with a view to start mining the area. The upshot was a surprisingly well-appointed 400sq ft burrow in which he socially distanced for almost a decade.
“WE BLAZE BACK DOWN THE MOUNTAIN, A TINY CARMINE RED SMEAR”
His undoing was his passion for playing with radios. In 1942, during WWII, his German name and the huge radio mast he’d installed on top of the rock led him to be, perhaps somewhat rashly, accused of being a German spy. When the police came to take him in for questioning, Frank barricaded himself into his bunker, so the cops tried to smoke him out.
The plan backfired, quite literally, when a tear gas canister landed under Frank’s table and ignited his sizeable supplies of dynamite. The blast was so intense it instantly killed poor old Critzer and even injured the deputies standing outside. So his story ends there.
And so does ours for now. The Turbo S has been nothing short of sensational, dealing with everything I’ve thrown at it like the seasoned pro that it is. It’s so good that you almost take its achievements for granted. From filling it with baggage, to commuting, to scorching up and down mountains, even taking it for a spot of light off-roading, it’s handled it all with an air of effortless capability and class.
Is it really all the car you’d ever need? Almost certainly. But more than that, it’s probably also all the car you’d ever want, too.
“YOU ALMOST TAKE ITS ACHIEVEMENTS FOR GRANTED”