PAST CAN’T HIDE PRESENT POWER
Porsche’s new Boxster pays homage to its racing heritage with the 718 name; races into future with turbo fours, Brian Harper writes.
The story of the Porsche 718 is a tale of two cars. There’s a time span of some 50 years separating the two, but the connection is more than generic.
One was a small, lightweight and very agile mid-engine sports/ race car, victorious on numerous circuits during the late 1950s and early ’60s, including the Targa Florio road race and Le Mans. The other is a lightweight, agile sports car, known better for pure driving enjoyment than race wins. They share a common manufacturer — Porsche — as well as flat-four power plants.
The 718, a model somewhat obscure to those who aren’t ardent Porschephiles, represents the past. The present, thanks to what Porsche calls a “restructuring,” is the 718 Boxster, the fourth-generation two-seater appropriating the numeric designation of its forebear for the 2017 model year.
While the nod to Porsche’s race history is understandable, it’s a bit of a distraction from what’s really noteworthy: 20 years after the Boxster first debuted, it has dumped its flat-six power plants for a pair of turbo fours. Any cries of heresy from the faithful can be easily tempered with the realization that these flat fours are more powerful and less thirsty than the now-departed sixes.
The new 718 Boxster (or 982, using Porsche’s internal designation) develops 300 horsepower from its 2.0-litre engine, while the 718 Boxster S pumps out a more robust 350 hp from its 2.5-L displacement. Porsche also uses a turbocharger with variable turbine geometry ( VTG) for the S, an engineering detail shared with the 911 Turbo. The result is a power gain of 35 hp compared with the previous Boxster models, plus fuel economy improvements of up to 13 per cent.
With those necessary details out of the way, allow a brief interruption to wax euphoric on the unparalleled joy of top-down driving in a ragtop sports car on a sunny day on lightly travelled European back roads.
The Lava Orange ( bright yet tasteful) Boxster driven during the morning was a well-behaved beast — 300 hp in a car weighing just 1,365 kilograms with the PDK (30 kg less for the six-speed manual) makes for satisfying acceleration. Porsche says the Boxster, when equipped with PDK and the Sport Chrono Package, sprints from zero to 100 km/ h in 4.7 seconds, which is 0.8 seconds faster than last year’s model. Sure, the S is faster by a half-second, but nobody should feel diminished for buying the Boxster (and saving $14,100 in the process).
That being said, access to a local military base’s airstrip provided an opportunity to test a European-spec 718 S with a six-speed manual as the gods of speed — and Porsche’s formidable engineering department — intended. Three separate activities — slalom, lane change and acceleration run — gave us a sampling of the S’s flat-out speed and handling dexterity.
The car’s grip and overall agility borders on the exceptional. And with a two-km stretch of wide tarmac to let it all hang out, I cranked the mid-engine two-seater up to 7,500 rpm in its first four gears, hitting an indicated 240 km/h about a second after the upshift into fifth. Oh, yeah. The 718 S now has the same brakes as on the previous 911 Carrera (with the base 718 upgrading to the previousgeneration Boxster S’s brakes), so scrubbing off speed quickly before the tarmac ended was never in question.
Performance bona fides established, neither of the two models is a prima donna; they are both very easy to drive at more rational speeds, and can run in a higher gear at low rpm without complaint. The ride, given a workout on more than one cobblestoned street, is always firm, though not painfully harsh. Optional is Porsche’s Active Suspension Management (PASM) with a ride height lowered by 10 millimetres. And, for the first time, the PASM sport chassis with a 20-mm lower ride height is available as an option for the S.
The 911 — in its multitude of permutations — is, and will likely always be, the standard bearer for Porsche. The Cayenne and Macan SUVs are the volumeselling money-makers. But the 718 Boxster is the purest example of a traditional sports car the company makes.