You are not dreaming…
…this really is happening. Five of Porsche’s greatest cars, to ourselves. On a track. For the day. Let’s go
FWe’reor a company often maligned for evolving its 911 more gently than Mother Nature, Porsche has made some huge leaps over seven decades – not simply models that expanded its own frame of reference, but often the introduction of cars that shifted the automotive universe on its axis.
driving five of those key moments at Sonoma Raceway, a senior-level track that flows through rolling hills north of San Francisco. It’s a mouth-watering and at times mouth-drying selection: one of the earliest ever 911s; the 917 race car similar to the 1970 Le Mans winner; the radical 959 that administered tech-heavy CPR to the 911 in the ’80s; the 918 Spyder that fused high performance and electrification in the mid-’10s; and finally the Taycan saloon that brings Porsche’s seven decades up to date with 751bhp and zero emissions.
Trace the Porsche timeline back to 1948 and you’ll find Ferdinand Porsche in Gmünd, Austria, knocking out the first 356, a pragmatic sports car built on Beetle underpinnings. The 911 represented a very thorough evolution of 356 fundamentals in 1963, but there were sizeable steps forward, too: an all-new flat-six put fresh air between the 911 and those Volkswagens; semi-trailing arms instead of swing axles gave more predictable handling; and the Porsche’s longer, narrower body made for a roomier interior. Not radical in concept, then, but enough to see the 911 become a sports car and motorsport benchmark. It remains so to this day.
The example we’re driving is ‘technically’ a 911 in all mechanical aspects, but was actually marketed as a 901 when it rolled from the assembly line. The Porsche Museum believes this to be the 55th and final ‘901’ before Peugeot objected to a zero being the meat in a three-digit sandwich. ‘On 22 October 1964, Ferry Porsche said “Call it a 911”, and this was the last of three cars built that day,’ reasons Alexander Klein of the Porsche Museum.
There are no obvious differences to a 911 built on 23 October, given only cars in the brochures wore 901 badging, but subtle variations from later models are the stuff to fill internet forums and empty drinking establishments: a higher engine grille, different bumper over-riders, different trim.
The driver’s seat is high-set for a sports car, the aged bolsters easily collapse under my weight, and the steering wheel is large in diameter, with four spokes stretching to the thin wooden rim around the quarter-to-three position, as if a modern racing car’s oblong steering wheel is contained within the rim’s perimeter. Ease the dog-leg gearbox down and left for first, release the friendly clutch and we’re chuntering on to the track, slotting the delicate little lever through second and… actually second is fine, with tall gearing, just 130bhp and the steep climb through Sonoma’s first section.
The bulk of the centre console in a modern 911 makes it easy to forget there’s no drivetrain ahead, but here it’s almost Flintstones bare past the gearlever, a reminder that it’s ‘slow-in, fast-out’ for the bends.
Drive the 901 around Sonoma’s undulations and it’s hard to comprehend how the 911 earned a reputation for trickiness. Wearing modern Pirelli 15-inch tyres made in the style of period originals, with a thin 165-width all-round (911s didn’t get ⊲
I’m finding it hard to comprehend how the 911 earned a reputation for trickiness
staggered tyres until later), deep sidewalls, and the modest output from its 2.0-litre six, the back-to-basics 901 is at home here.
The front feels strikingly light, like the nose is filled with helium, and the raised front wings contextualise the car’s compact dimensions, encouraging you to shoot for apexes and edge up to track limits. The sweetness of the turn-in is partly because there’s so little mechanical baggage over the front end, but these early 911s also had a wheelbase 57mm shorter than those from ’68. Agility feels heightened. Conversely, twitchiness does not.
Having same-size rubber all round no doubt helps quell what should be a natural tendency to understeer, too. Instead you push in to a soft brake pedal, settling the weight over the nose, and turn in to the corner as the light, progressive steering tremors a little, telegraphing the flexing of tread blocks, adhesion’s last gasp. And then, barely past the apex, you progressively flatten the throttle and power out with 184kg of engine squashing down the rear tyres – a huge percentage of the 1080kg kerbweight. The 901 could handle much more power, of course, but it doesn’t even have passive essentials like seatbelts, let alone active aids like ABS or stability control. So harmoniously is it balanced that it never occurs to you that they’re lacking.
As Porsche finessed the 911, so it dropped the bombshell of the 917 in 1969, as if it’d got the memo to up its game in the year of the moon landings and Concorde’s first flight. Designed by Hans Mezger under Ferdinand Piëch to meet new sports prototype regulations that required only 25 examples to be built, the 917 took the 908 racer as its starting point, and featured a spaceframe chassis weighing just 42kg. Porsche inserted into this its largest ever engine – a flat-12 created by joining two flat-sixes at the hip. It won Le Mans in 1970 driven by Richard Attwood and Hans Herrmann, the first of Porsche’s record 19 victories.
This car was chassis number 15 of 35 and won at Spa in the 1971 World Sports Car Championship, run by Brit John Wyer’s JW Automotive Engineering, the disciplinarian team boss of ’50s Aston and ’60s Ford GT fame. Its fibreglass body finished in period-perfect Gulf colours, it wouldn’t look out of place on a Thunderbirds launch pad.
The 917 achieved 235mph in an era when aerodynamics were so poorly understood that the rear-view mirror could be perfectly aligned in the pitlane then point at nothing but sky at high speed. JWA engineer John Horsman helped cure that when he fitted experimental aluminium sheets to the rear of the 917 and created the 917K, for Kurzheck or Short-tail, with its wedgier rump. Our car gets that more stable configuration, but it still weighs only 800kg and produces around 620bhp – the passage of 50 years hasn’t dimmed the terror of 775bhp-per-tonne.
I’m no giant at 6’1”, and you almost lie down in the 917 cockpit, but I have to remove the padding from the fibreglass seat to fit inside, and even then there’s only 10mm headroom. The windscreen is goldfish-bowl domed, the front wings rise above my shoulders, and if you took the delicate little panel off between the front lights, you’d see my feet wiggling about on the pedals, like they’re sticking out beneath bed sheets. Best not think about it.
Every little squeak and clang is amplified in this bare cockpit, and then I turn a tiny little key and the silence isn’t so much shattered as exploded by the flat-12 – here in its largest 5.0–litre incarnation – behind my head. If the noise is astonishing, the rate at which this big motor’s revs flick up when you tickle the accelerator is downright violent – more like spinning round a volume dial than prodding a pedal. The other pedals are very different ⊲
The speed and feel to the 917’s steering suggest you’d make a quick correction should the rear break free
siblings: the clutch heavy and bitey, the brake long and spongy.
This is not a high-speed exploration of this 917’s limits – it was shipped here on cut slicks, and later I’ll feel it lift over the waterlogged sections of track – but so distinctive are the 917’s nuances that it reveals much of its traits with a decently spirited drive. You’re aware of sitting as far forward in the chassis as pictures suggest, and there’s go-kart spirit in a 917’s eagerness to dive flat for corners. The speed, feel and ease to the steering all suggest you’d make a quick correction should the rear end break free.
Carving into corners, I can clearly feel the front tyres skate right on the cusp of understeer, arcing and gripping, sensing that if I lifted quickly and then re-applied that throttle I’d have it hanging at all sorts of angles. Best not today. The lightness of the front contrasts with the huge hunk of flat-12 lumbering over the rear, shooting the 917 forward on a breath of throttle. The noise is strong and deep even at modest revs, with a recognisably ‘flat’ character to its bass, but smooth and finely balanced as the treble takes over and the revs rapidly climb, titanium conrods pounding, quad cams and Bosch injection managing the fuel flow. So quick is the 917 to chomp through revs that soon you’re reaching to the right for the H-pattern shifter capped with its balsa wood knob. It’s light enough in its action but responds best to a good solid pull; tiny pause, suck of induction, then all that fury simply repeats. Spongy brakes remain the real confidence-killer, but what a privilege.
World Sports Car regulation changes saw the 917 switch to – and win – the Can-Am championship for ’72 and ’73, where Porsche removed the roof and added turbocharging. It helped push the 917’s power outputs past a still ludicrous 1500bhp, and the know-how trickled down to motorsport 911s and the
The 959’s turbo gauge wavering is a theatrical little drum roll before a huge thwack of boost
roadgoing Porsche 911 Turbo of 1974. That couldn’t stop the 911 ending up on death row over the next decade, with Porsche switching to the front-engined 928, 924 and 944. But when new CEO Peter Schutz arrived he reversed that decision, telling chief engineer Helmuth Bott to extend the 911’s life indefinitely. Bott didn’t muck about, and suggested a 911-based supercar to compete in Group B motorsport. The 959 entered production in 1986. Just 292 were built.
Longer, aerodynamically optimised bodywork on hollow-spoke magnesium 17s gives the 959 the great new diet/same old wardrobe look and distantly echoes the ‘Moby-Dick’ 935 Le Mans racers. The bodywork fuses aluminium with kevlar, and you can actually see the line between the aluminium roof and the composite body. The flat-six was downsized to 2.85 litres at a time when the 911 Turbo had 3.3 and the 959 got twin-cam water-cooled heads and sequential turbochargers – a small one to manage low-rpm boost and a bigger, laggier one for top-end punch. This was the first Porsche with all-wheel drive, and the electronically controlled system could send 80 per cent of power to the rear wheels.
The 959 was three times as expensive as the 911 Turbo, at £150,000, yet Porsche lost a rumoured £200k on every car. Still, as CAR noted in May 1984 when the concept was shown, ‘The 959 probably extends the life of the 911 for at least 10 years.’
Group B was cancelled before the 959 was homologated (though the 959 would win the Paris-Dakar) but the 959’s real rival was the Ferrari F40, even if the two were poles apart: Maranello taking a raw, visceral path for its F40, Stuttgart going all in on technology and luxury.
The 959 cockpit is clearly 911-derived if luxuriously appointed, our pre-production car getting no-cost striped cloth upholstery for the low-set, nicely supportive seats, and silver-tinged leather for the steering wheel and gear gaiter. If buyers were paying for technology, they absolutely knew it: dials to firm the dampers, another to raise the ride height on separate ⊲
‘I RACED THE 917’
Richard Attwood drove the 917 to victory at Le Mans 1970 and was on hand as CAR drove the 917. Tricky car, Richard? ‘None of the factory drivers wanted to drive it at the Nürburgring – it was almost a strike. Truth is I didn’t want to drive it either!’
But then Vic Elford requested Attwood as co-driver for Le Mans 1969. ‘Vic said he liked the 917. I don’t know if it was bravado or something, but when I drove it, it wandered horrendously. Testing had been done on an airfield, and I don’t believe they were getting to terminal velocity, maybe 185mph. It would do 235mph.’
In that first Le Mans, privateer John Woolfe was killed on the opening lap, and Attwood vividly remembers the gruelling drive, the unbearable noise from the exhausts – two exiting under each door, two at the back. ‘I was in a lot of pain after not even two hours,’ he grimaces. ‘Fortunately the race was dry, because in the wet I honestly believe we’d have retired the car.’ In the event, gearbox failure forced retirement. ‘The factory thought I was disappointed, but I was drained… and relieved!
The handling was fixed with the 917K. ‘The Shorttail wasn’t as fast in a straight line but you had the stability. It was like driving a di erent car – we had to slow for the kink at the end of the straight the year before; now it was flat, a piece of piss.’
Just as the 918 still looks futuristic, with its space-age body and jet-pack engine cover, it remains astonishing
hydraulic struts, clocks to show how much the diffs are shu ing power, a winter mode too.
For a car still considered advanced, the 959’s classic flat-six chatter on start-up now feels anachronistic – the four-valve heads might have been water-cooled, but the block was still chilled by air. The pedals are also floorhinged, the clutch brutally spring-loaded and the brake pedal rather dead if extremely effective, with ABS reassurance too. The gearlever initially appears a dogleg five-speed, and ‘first’ is actually down and to the left. But there’s also a mystery ‘G’ gear above it, for gelande, or off-road, like a low-ratio. Here lies the real first gear, and the layout allowed Porsche to pass emissions regulations in Switzerland, which were tested in third gear (thus actually a mislabelled fourth in the 959).
The 959 isn’t happy around Sonoma, with a front end that never cleanly keys in to the cold, greasy surface and leisurely, light steering that exacerbates a sense of impending understeer. It’s far better experienced on nearby roads, with its plush, isolated ride, and now front-end grip and traction that lets you climb all over the fast pedal far earlier than you’d expect. Mostly, though, this is a fairly soft GT, a car to stride over long distances effortlessly at high speed, even if the power delivery has a wicked kick. In fact, only now has the new 992 Carrera S matched the 959’s 444bhp and 3.7sec 0-62mph time (with better tyres and launch control), and still lags 6mph behind the 959’s 197mph top speed – a world record for production cars at its launch.
Laggy down low, 959 boost comes on in little increments from the high 2000s, as the needle in the turbo gauge wavers like it’s power-lifting. It’s a theatrical little drumroll before a huge thwack of boost from the big turbo hits around 4900rpm, lifting the nose, forcefully shoving you back, whooshing right through to 7300rpm. The release of pressure is almost as explosive as the performance should you fail to nail the next ratio quickly – best bang it in, keep the power coming. It still feels extremely quick, even if that latest Carrera S – handily available for a back-to-back – is superior in performance, smoothness of delivery and throttle response. But the fact that we’re talking about them in the same breath shows just how advanced the 959 was over three decades ago.
Porsche would take a break from supercars until 2003, when the Carrera GT debuted with its V10 engine from a stillborn F1 project, and a design that made clear this was no super-911. But the 918 Spyder that followed in 2014 represents the bigger leap, with its plug-in petrol-electric drivetrain. The V8 was derived from the RS Spyder LMP2 car, and worked with two electric motors (one at the rear, one up front) to give Porsche engineers a practice run before dominating Le Mans with a hybrid.
The 918 Spyder, McLaren P1 and LaFerrari hypercars came along like double-decker buses in late 2013/2014, and in concept the Porsche is closer to the McLaren than the Ferrari – both use a V8 engine and can run on electricity alone (for up to 18 miles in the case of the Porsche, helping it achieve 71g/km CO2 and 94mpg on the old emissions cycle). But the 918 gets a naturally-aspirated V8 (the McLaren is turbo) good for 600bhp with a searing 9000rpm redline, and twin electric motors that added another 282bhp. The total 875bhp/940lb ft was marshalled by all-wheel drive, unlike its rear-drive rivals.
With a production run of 918 units and a £650k price tag, this was the affordable, more widely available hybrid hypercar, one quite possibly easier to purchase than a 911 GT3 given they took a while to shift.
Just as the 918 still looks futuristic, with its sleek space-age body and jet-pack engine cover, it remains an astonishing car. You climb over a huge hunk of carbon sill that showcases the carbonfibre tub, and settle in to fixed-back bucket seats that ended up in GT3 and GT2 911s. The little drivemode controller on the steering wheel now features in the 911, so too the inappropriately small shifter. There are many, many buttons.
It’s great mischief to confuse the small child as he stands with his dad in the pits, bracing for the 918 to start up only for the car to roll silently away, but the respite does not last long: the 918 is an unexpectedly raw, guttural machine, with a deep industrial belch from the V8 that’s unlike any other Porsche (and much like the McLaren). You feel its resonance through the seats; hear it tingling in the dash structure. Road debris clatters in the wheelarches as you move.
You’re also aware of the near-1700kg bulk of this machine, but pacey, nicely weighted steering imparts welcome agility and suffers pleasingly little corruption ⊲
from the e-torque flowing through the front axle. And the chassis remains so capable it’s otherworldly: firm if pliant enough in its softest setting not to be a pain in the backside, but with that weight managed so ably that you can pour it into corners at daft speeds without stressing the composure, then nail the throttle. There’s a little less power here than the McLaren or Ferrari, but you can use more of it more often. Very Porsche. And it was the only one to declare a proper Nürburgring lap time.
Modern supercars with 700bhp or more and less weight have closed the gap to the 918’s performance, and beaten that 6min 57sec ’Ring time (even the 513bhp GT3 RS has gone faster, such is the march of progress), but the delivery and the speed here are still incredible. No turbos means no turbo lag, but neither is there a sense of this engine waking up, just instant punch. It takes off from 70mph in seventh like it’s in third, no exaggeration, and the shifts are so punchy you can play the engine as you would a piano. There is performance everywhere, and it’s spookily composed.
Other than weight, the brakes are the only other issue: stamp on them and they’re fine, because this is pure friction braking and speed is ruthlessly wiped away. The problem is the last little bit of modulation when you bleed off. Here the 918’s using the e-motors to slow you down and charge the battery. It feels odd and inconsistent, more so than LaFerrari (McLaren avoided regenerative charging altogether), the big black mark on an otherwise thoroughly compelling hypercar.
Five years later, Porsche has nailed regenerative braking with the Taycan, an all-new, all-electric saloon that in spirit and design seems to split the Panamera and 911. The brakes crush speed with the authority you’d expect, but feel entirely natural too. They’re also mammoth, a by-product of Porsche’s test procedure of repeatedly braking from high speed without fade – because the Taycan accelerates back up to full speed so quickly during these tests, there’d be no time to cool smaller braking hardware that’d overheat sooner. And yet the irony is the Taycan doesn’t use the discs at all in 90 per cent of normal driving – it lets regen take the strain.
Of course, the Taycan marks a much bigger leap than simply really good brakes. It is the best EV ever produced, better than the excellent Jaguar i-Pace, better than a Tesla, and shot through with the integrity and capability we expect from Porsche. We’re driving the top-spec Turbo S, its familiar badging a reminder that Porsche hasn’t thrown the baby out with the bathwater, despite making an emissions-free weapon with all-wheel drive and 751bhp.
Inside it’s more conventional in its packaging than the i-Pace, though there’s generous space (if tight rear headroom) with familiar Porsche DNA in the rising centre console, steering wheel and sporty driving position. Pity you turn it on with a power button like a kitchen appliance, because it’s anything but.
Acceleration is nothing less than devastating: floor it from rest and the Taycan squats a little, you feel the rear tyres grip and slip like a couple of clicks of some immaculately engineered watch mechanism, and then it blams forward with the ferocity of a drone strike: 2.8sec 0-62mph. It’s a similar story at speed, when the Taycan has subtly clicked up to the second of its two gears on the rear axle’s transmission (the front has a standard one-speed planetary gear). A squeeze of throttle is all you need to demolish a twisty road at an indecently quick lick. Back off and there’s also a much more natural sense of ‘engine’ braking than you’ll find in other EVs, which focus on recuperation and therefore a strong feeling of negative torque – Porsche reckons coasting is more e£cient in many instances, and that heaps of off-throttle retardation asks for too much adjustment on behalf of the driver.
Perhaps most crucially, the Taycan’s chassis does just as much heavy lifting. The steering is firm and precise, helping to at least partially offset the lack of feel, and the Taycan rides sweetly, suppresses noise well, and manages its huge mass with real dexterity – you wouldn’t guess at its disappointing 2.3 tonnes, which is concealed by the low centre of gravity of the 93.4KwH battery, torque vectoring and rear-wheel steering. Really it’s this seemingly effortless marriage of dynamics and powertrain that makes the Taycan such a satisfying sporting GT. No, I’m not ready to give up my flatsix and manual shift just yet, but while legislation still allows Porsche to tightrope between the two eras and the choice is yours, it’s win-win.
The leap from analogue, flat-six 901 to digital battery-electric Taycan is almost unimaginably huge but, just over 80 years after Ferdinand Porsche cut his teeth developing the electric Lohner-Porsche, there’s a neat symmetry that Porsche’s most advanced car echoes its first. How it evolves the 911 into a radically different future will be the most interesting and important chapter of all. But while we wait for that, can I get just one more go in the 917?
Pity you turn the Taycan on with a power button like a kitchen appliance, because it’s anything but