Boxers bout
Report 2 Porsche 718 Cayman £42,897 OTR/ £52,435 as tested
The 718 Cayman’s big headline is its engine. After a decade of howling fat-six Caymans, this one launched with a fat-four boxer turbo in the middle. Emissions regs are to blame, of course. But while it was greeted with more than a smidge of outrage, I think some of the dissenters were ignoring that one of the performance car icons uses a boxer four. I refer to the Subaru Impreza Turbo and its myriad successors.
By chance, I’ve experienced two of the most exciting versions this month, providing some nice context for the Cayman. One is an ex-WRC car once tested by a man called Colin (p110), running perhaps the greatest, most pulsating fat-four engine in history. The other is the WRX STI Final Edition which produces the same 296bhp as our Porsche, but delivers it in a more bombastically turbocharged manner.
Both sound more cultured, more dramatic and more memorable than the 718. From their buh-buh-buh-buh as they idle in trafc to their ferociously hard edge at the top of the rev range, they’re intoxicating, if not exactly sexy cars to listen to. They show up Porsche’s latest fat-four as, well, a bit fat.
But I’m warming to the 718’s sound. In every other Porsche, you get in and press the Sport button – activating the sports exhaust – by muscle memory. The trick is to not do that here. Without the exhaust activated, the Cayman’s 2.0-litre sounds more natural and, unless you’re nailing it, does a half-decent impression of those sonorous old sixes. It certainly sounds Porsche-like at lower speeds.
The same emissions regs that have made Porsche downgrade the Cayman to four cylinders have also forced Subaru to stop selling the WRX STI in Europe, the car above being its grand send of. The irony? The 718’s day-to-day 29mpg is precisely 2mpg better than the WRX…