“Porsches are driven exclusively by wankers.” It’s a common refrain, and one I tend to agree with. I know every time I see a Porsche in traffic and I catch a look at the driver, I sneer and think to myself: “what a wanker!”
But, see, my motivation – aside from the fact that the guy always, without fail, looks like a wanker – is mostly jealousy. I don’t imagine there’s anyone on the planet who I would not label a wanker, if seen behind the wheel of a Porsche. They may be fine, upstanding pillars of the community; the guy with the expensive sunglasses and an ill-concealed smug look on his mug may well be a loving family man, a contributor to charities, an owner of fluffy puppies and adorable kittens, etc etc. Put him in a Porsche: he’s a wanker.
I wish I could be a wanker.
Porsches are highly regarded and waxed-lyrically for a reason: they are awesome. Their seminal model, the 911 Carrera, is a million times better than it really ought to be. Its engine hangs way out back, almost entirely behind the rear axle line, and by rights it ought to be pure evil to drive – and the older ones were exactly that. With little weight up front and everything hanging over the driven rear wheels, it would turn into corners like magic and put its grunt down in miraculous fashion, egging you on, making you feel like a hero, not believing but absolutely revelling in the sheer speed and unadulterated joy of driving on offer… right up to the point where you decided you were going a bit too fast in that corner and it was time to lift off the power, whereupon physics would take over, the rear end of the car would overtake the front end, and that great heavy engine in the back of your Porker would drag you backwards off the road and, more often than not, to your fiery agonising death.
That was back in the day, when real men drove Porsches and poseurs crashed Porsches. Now, after forty years of building Carreras with all their weight hanging beyond their bum, they’ve somehow managed to train the thing to do all the magic stuff – grip, turn in, power out and talk to the driver like nothing else – and NOT kill you if you forgot where the engine was mid-corner. An awesome achievement, and rightly deserving of every plaudit Porsche have received.
All of this is well and good, but doesn’t seem to have much bearing on our discussion here. Blog topic: what car should I buy. My price point is around $20k, remember? I’d be surprised if there’s any 911 Carrera out there, of any age, available for anything approaching $20k – at least, none with four wheels and an engine. There’s plenty of old, dragged-their-drivers-arse-first-to-oblivion wrecks that can be had for, say, the price of a small Hyundai. But they hold limited appeal to yours truly, who’s looking for something to drive, not rebuild from a pile of burnt ashes.
Porsche did build other cars aside from the rear-engined 911. There were a variety of front-engined 924s and 928s from the seventies and eighties that ranged from marginally woeful to surprisingly good, which may now be had for plebeian money. But I’ve no interest in them.
Those cars grew up into something called a 968, or something like that, which were built up until the mid-nineties and, well, there’s not much appeal in them. A quick search of carsales.com.au suggests the majority have been converted into club racers, which is not what I’m looking for – if some humpty’s been racing it, chances are that humpty crashed it, or skimped on its maintenance, or otherwise bounced it mercilessly around and between racetracks with a total lack of mechanical sympathy. If it’s got drill holes in the roof and floor, it used to have a roll cage, and that’s where I walk away.
Then, in 1997, Porsche came out with the Boxster. Much like they probably did with the 92-model Porsches, many purists derided the Boxster as “not a real Porsche”. Perhaps with the 92-cars they had a point – apparently they were based on a platform shared with Volkswagen, and the 924 even came with the same watery VW inline-four-cylinder engine (Sacrilege! Heretics! and so forth). And for a long time I turned my nose up at the Boxster too; with the original model’s skinny tyres, diminutive pinched hips and me-too fried-egg headlights that mirrored the 911 of the time, I dismissed it as a mere “hairdresser’s car”, a Porsche bought by a poor man who could not afford a 911.
Some years later, in fact only a week or two ago, it finally occurred to me: as a matter of fact, I am a poor man who cannot afford a 911… and good old carsales.com.au reveals the oldest Boxsters are starting at a very appealing $19k. How about that?
The Boxster isn’t actually all that bad. In fact, it’s rather good. The original 1997 “986” series came with a real Porsche-like engine: a flat-six (also referred to as a “boxer” engine, as two rows of three cylinders are laid flat such that the cylinders fire towards each other, as though they were “boxing”) of a not-inconsequential 2.5L displacement, putting out a highly respectable 150kW and 260Nm in a little bitty body weighing only 1250kg. With your average new-model Ford Focus pushing the scales towards 1400kg, that’s quite good – and our Boxster makes a fair fist of things, with quoted acceleration from rest to a hundred clicks of 6.9 seconds. So far’s I’m concerned, if a car can do the standard metric sprint in less than seven seconds, then it’s plenty quick.
Is it a decent steer? Or is it a murderous little slice of evil, forever plotting your untimely demise a la the early-model Carrera? Well sir, the Boxster is a mid-engined car, meaning the weight of the engine is contained entirely between the two axles – the format preferred by Ferrari, McLaren, Lamborghini, and other esteemed makers of wickedly fast cars. And if I wrack my brain, I remember reading in Wheels magazine way back in 1997 when a well-respected Aussie motoring journo, name of Peter Robinson, test-drove a Boxster for the first time and came away declaring it to be the finest handling piece of automotive machinery he had ever had the pleasure to steer. Not exactly faint praise, there.
Imagine it: all the clarity and purity of steering feel, turn-in and car placement as offered by the Carrera. But instead of several hundred kilos of steel and fluids sitting well astern of the rear axle, forever trying to give car and driver a pine tree enema, it’s sited right behind the driver and applying its inertial forces more or less equally to all four tyres. Add its lesser overall weight, the typical tactile delights of a Porsche clutch and gearbox, and that unique sound of a flat six at full song… I’ve never driven one, but I tell you: I can’t wait to try.
Misgivings about purchasing a fourteen-year-old European sports car? All the usual misgivings over the thought of purchasing a fourteen-year-old car – who owned it, how did they treat it, what’s let go over the years, what’s about to let go, etc. Plus the usual misgivings over purchasing a European car: quality control never as assured as a Japanese car, hideously large costs for even the most mundane servicing items, etc etc. Plus the usual misgivings over purchasing a sports car: further heightening of service costs and replacement of consumables, the likelihood of the thing having been thrashed or crashed by a former owner, the increased importance of a decent service history linked to the increased scale of catastrophe should even one service have been delayed or missed, etc etc etc. Add on to all of this, the fact that the Boxster doesn’t actually have a removable engine cover: save for some oil and fluid access ports in the back of the car, the only way you can actually get at the engine for even a routine service activity is to jack the car up and drop the engine down on a sling. So I’ve read somewhere. I find that incredible, to be honest, but stranger things have happened in this world.
So then: if the positives may be judged to outweigh the risks, perhaps it might be a twenty thousand dollar Porsche for sir. Whodathunkit? Certainly not me, at least, not until a couple weeks ago. That’s the best thing about life – stick around for long enough, the surprises just keep getting better.
Tres profound, no?
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