991 Carrera T first drive
1,500 kilometers, 48 hours, one question to answer: has Porsche made a success of its most driver-focused modern Carrera yet?
Genuine driver’s dream or mere marketing ploy? Our first drive verdict has your answer
There’s a school of thought that brilliant though the 991 generation is as an all-rounder, it’s slipped too far into the realms of being an able grand tourer rather than an out-and-out sports car. Compared to its 997 predecessor, today’s 911 is longer, wider and fatter – turbocharged 991 Carreras weigh up to 20 kilograms more than their 997.2 rivals. What’s more, they’re now equipped with an overload of technology: while this does prove beneficial in terms of performance, safety and economy, it largely comes with a caveat of alienating from the overall driving experience. For some, the 911 had lost its way of late but predictably, Porsche fought back – as it has so often done in the past – with emphatic results.
This ensuing crusade for the engaging, back-to-basics and driver-focused Porsche road car began with the R of 2016. It’s since filtered right down the 911 range via the GT3 Touring, announced in the autumn of 2017 and, now, the Carrera T – the first such non-gt Neunelfer. Likely the last Carrera derivative for Porsche’s 991-generation 911, the car comes fully equipped with a new chassis, a revised transmission, and a funny name. In case you’re wondering, Porsche says that ‘T’ appendix is an evocation of the early, pre-impact-bumper 911Ts, the initial standing for Touring. Which is handy, because touring is indeed what we’re to be doing, albeit at pace. The call came on the Wednesday afternoon, Porsche GB informing us there was a Stuttgart-registered Carrera T sitting at a hotel in Nice, France, which needed bringing back to its UK headquarters. Would we like to deliver it for them?
There was a catch, though. “We’ll fly you out to Nice for Saturday morning first thing but we need the car with us at Porsche Reading for 2pm on Monday.” 1,500 kilometres in just over 48 hours – with pictures documenting the whole thing – sounds like a challenge that’s ripe for a Total 911 adventure.
And that’s why, come Saturday morning, we find ourselves standing next to a left-hand-drive Carrera T in the hills above Nice, its bright Miami blue hue resplendent in the morning winter sun. A choice selection of Agate grey accents comprising door decals, Sport Design mirrors and multi-spoke wheels compliments the T’s unique appearance, their contrast working just as effectively on a Guards red example sitting beside it.
So what should you know about the car before we start our repatriation back to the UK? Well, the Carrera T shares the same narrow-bodied shell and 370hp engine as its 991.2 Carrera counterpart, though there have been some crucial tweaks to the T’s resumé. Firstly, there’s the wheel and tyre package, which has been taken from the Carrera S, the wheels now 20-inches in diameter with a 10mm-wider tyre footprint of 245 and 305 front and rear respectively. The T also boasts an S-spec PASM Sport chassis
– not available on the base Carrera – reducing ride height by 10mm, and a new, shorter final drive ratio has also been borrowed from the Carrera S. But this isn’t a mere parts-bin special from the Carrera lineup: the T has had clear influence from its bigger brothers in the GT department, too. There are no rear seats for starters, while thinner glass deployed aft of its
‘B’ pillar is a weight-saving cue taken directly from the 991 GT2 RS. Door pull straps have been seized from the defunct 991.1 GT3 RS production line, and a shorter, stubbier gear shifter is inspired by that found poking out of the R’s centre console.
Elsewhere, a smaller-diameter GT Sport steering wheel, measuring 360mm, and four-way electric Sports seats – the lightest Sport seats you can spec in a Carrera, though full buckets are an option – form the driver’s main touch points inside the cabin.
Sports exhaust and Sport Chrono, minus the Chrono clock, feature as standard spec, but PCM has been binned off (you can spec it back at no cost), Porsche confident the only soundtrack drivers of this car will want to listen to is that 9A2 flat six out back. A paragon of driver purity, then? This could be the ultimate take on an accessible Carrera that many enthusiasts have been waiting years for. We’d better hit the road.
Heading east along France’s Côte d’azur, we turn north at Menton to head up into the mountains of the Alpes-maritimes, home of the spectacular Col de Turini. The Col is twisty, technical and breathtakingly picturesque, with plenty of elevation changes. Of course the inevitable downside to such a wonderful piece of transport engineering is its brilliance attracts an audience, and you therefore have to share it with others – namely cyclists. Not today, however: it’s one week before Christmas and temperatures are stubbornly low, these being the likely prime factors behind us having the Col to ourselves. Perfect.
Past Sospel, the scenery around us quickly evolves into something much more dramatic, and so the road becomes more serpentine as it hugs the contours of a rugged rock face. What’s better, the surface is
surprisingly smooth, and thus we’re presented with the sort of environment which Porsche claims the Carrera T was built for.
Almost immediately, the corners come thick and fast, dinking this way and that, and we begin to get our first real taste of the Carrera T’s chassis. While its ride is pleasantly supple around town (gone are the days of M030-optioned cars being back-breakingly stiff), activating the firmer setting for sporty driving sees the T keep close contact with the road surface, though it’s not as stiff as a GT car. This is somewhat pleasing, as this 911 is allowed to move around more, its softer setting giving the driver plenty to think about. It’s great fun managing it, heightened in this case as the T is a little more playful on its winter tyres.
There’s a short blast before our first set of hairpin turns as the road rises sharply up the mountainside, these steep, narrow switchbacks demanding a low entry speed. I drop into first, with Sport mode automatically rev matching so as not to upset the car’s balance. Pointing the nose through the left-hand corner, the power is hastily fed back in as the car is straightened. However, first ratio in this seven-speed unit is merely for standing starts, and so we reach its limit all too soon, calling for a change-up before we’ve properly got out of the corner. It’s just too early for a smooth, clean corner exit. No matter, a reciprocating right turn is already upon us, so this time I stay in second. Really though, the corner is too slow for the T’s second cog and, when the gas pedal is indeed called for, the engine’s rpms are simply too low to produce any significant exit speed. Alas, we stutter away from our second hairpin and elect to contend with hasty shifts out of first for these tightest of turns going forward.
As we tear up through the rest of the Col past Moulinet, bundles and then barrages of snow at the roadside give us an indication of our climb in altitude. We eventually stop at La Bollène-vésubie, the entire surface beneath our tyres now covered in a thin blanket of frost. A tip-off from a friendly Boxster Spyder owner (if we have to share the road with anyone else, at least it’s a Porsche) sees us pointed in the direction of the Col de Braus, especially seeing as reaching it requires us to retrace our steps halfway down the Col de Turini. “It’s picturesque, twisty and quiet,” he reassures us, so we jump back in the car, blissfully unaware of the afternoon sun already receding behind the mountainside.
Exhaust popping and crackling away on overrun as we begin our descent, the engine note does penetrate the T’s cabin more than it does in the base Carrera. The difference is tangible but not unduly obvious, and certainly not as harsh as what you’d find in, as an extreme, an RS 991. A good balance, then.
We reach the Col de Braus which, true to form, turns out to be another scintillating road. It’s wider than Turini and a little faster, too, allowing the Carrera T to stretch itself a little more. And here, a minor revelation resulting from that shorter final drive ratio, the T displaying a greater sense of urgency under acceleration. This pronounced turn of pace is keenly felt out of corners – when the gearing works in its favour of course. In fact, working up and down the H-patterned ‘box is generally good fun: its throw is nice and direct, yet this is more the perception brought about by a short, stubby shifter than any significant mechanical overhaul. It’s certainly not anywhere near as good as the six-speed gearbox found in Porsche’s current manual GT cars.
We spend the entirety of the late afternoon and early evening on the Col, sliding through its quiet, inviting switchbacks, only aware of the late hour when the last of the sun’s rays dips behind the silhouetted landscape in front of us. Bugger. The day has almost passed and yet here we are, still having far too much fun in the south of France. What to do? Staying locally another night is the answer, with a vow to get up early the next day and blast our way back to Britain. We head for some last-minute accomodation, but not before a quick sojourn into Monte Carlo for dinner and a requisite lap of the Formula One circuit. Carrera T on tour, right?
We arise early on Sunday, knowing a hell of a journey is before us. There is to be one last detour before heading strictly Calais bound, though, for our accommodation is in Vence, and I distinctly remember a recent phone call with fellow Total 911 scribe, Kyle Fortune, telling me to not pass up any opportunity to drive the famous Col de Vence.
Kyle’s words of wisdom prove resounding as we tackle an empty Col de Vence just after sunrise, its trail once again bereft of cyclists or any other traffic. The sound of the T’s throaty Sport exhaust reverberating off the craggy rock face, twinned with the knowledge that just the other side of those knee-high wooden barriers is a very large drop to the valley bed, raises hairs on the back of my neck as I rotate the T’s wheel and feed its nose through each winding turn. Col de Vence and ensuing photography complete, at last we input ‘Calais’ into the car’s PCM, the time just gone midday. We’ve 1,200 kilometres and a solid 11 hours of driving to the port, which gives us plenty of time to come to a conclusion on Porsche’s latest driver-focused lightweight.
About that ‘lightweight’ tag: Porsche will tell you the T’s stated saving is 20 kilograms over a similarly specced Carrera, but really this is a ‘best possible’ figure. The example we’re steering is a mere five kilograms lighter at 1,425kg, and while the car does feel marginally more lithe than a Carrera when at speed, we know that a company like Porsche – its reputation crafted from 70 years of building genuine lightweight specials – can do better. We’d therefore spec the no-cost PCM unit back in, as the positives for it being there far outweigh the negatives.
This seems to be a theme for the whole car, for while the Carrera T is a cracking 911, Porsche could have gone further. We love the chassis tweaks which deliver a focus lacking in the Carrera, the amendments to that final drive ratio also positively enhancing the intensity of the driving experience on a ribbon-like stretch of road. A genuine rework of that seven-speed gearbox would have benefitted the car more, though, ironically what many thought had happened when Porsche originally announced ‘transmission changes’ in the T’s launch blurb. A shorter second, third and fourth ratio would have proved more involving, circumventing the
T’s willingness to sit comfortably in third gear. Instead, low-down torque supplied by those twin turbochargers provides the impetus to pull you out of a medium-speed corner and take you all the way up to 103mph all on the third cog if you wish. Likewise, first gear, only ever useful for pulling the Carrera T away from a standstill, remains largely disused. This was particularly evident when trawling up the Col de Turini’s low-speed switchbacks, a road the car was arguably built for.
That’s not to say the T is a bad 911; far from it.
It’s a superior driver’s car to the base Carrera and absolutely better value than the S (the S priced at £87,335 in UK markets, the T £85,576), but the pick of the current Carrera range remains the GTS cars, which offer greater composure at higher speeds, not to mention a more desirable spec. Really, the Carrera T would have better suited the 991.1. Its 3.4-litre, naturally aspirated engine has to be worked very hard for you to get the best from it, which marries up wonderfully to the Carrera T’s own leitmotif. Now that really would have made for a cracking Neunelfer.
Our long drive back to Blighty is carried out via France’s many tollroads, an overnight stop-off near the old grandstands at Reims-gueux, then on through the Channel Tunnel. The Carrera T eventually rolls onto Porsche GB HQ soil in Reading for 2:26pm on Monday afternoon. We’re late, but no matter. Mission complete for Total 911, and though we find ourselves reluctant to hand over the keys for this driver-concentrated Carrera, the reality is this lightweight 911 could have been so much more.