Porsche has announced the new 911 Carrera T: a 911 that is 20 kilograms lighter than the regular Carrera, has a bunch of sporty touches and is sold in a range of bright colours. T stands for Touring, but the car is built with lightweight glass, RS-style pull loops in the doors and a shorter final drive ratio: all hallmarks of a sports purpose machine. The T badging is curious.
The Carrera S (S for Sport) does not come as standard with a shorter final drive, seven speed manual or limited slip differential, while the Carrera T (T for Touring) has all of those things. Twenty-seven litres of fuel equates to twenty kilograms. One could theoretically short fill a Carrera by 27 litres and have a car weighing the same as a Carrera T on full tanks.
The Touring Carrera also comes with less sound deadening (?), no rear seats and an unladen weight of 1425 kilograms. It has a chassis lowered by 10mm (four tenths of an inch), Sport Chrono but without the dash clock (which everyone loves and is sort of the point of Sport Chrono), a gearknob with red shift pattern, something else and some other stuff.
It has a power-to-weight ratio of 260hp per tonne. This is supposed to be viewed as exciting, and it probably is. But I have a twenty year-old BMW M3 sedan with full sound deadening and rear seats (seat belts for five people) that is not a million miles away from this figure. One could get the weight down pretty easily and stick a rocket up the power-to-weight, but that would defeat the point.
Yesterday, I drove a 911R recreation/celebration by the boys at EB Motorsport. It weighs 804 kilograms with a single seat, skinny R wheels and tyres, fully oiled up with a quarter tank of fuel. The twin-plug, 2-litre engine makes 220 horsepower, which gives a power-to-weight ratio of 275 horsepower per tonne (more on this car later).
OK, the Carrera T is £86k and the EB 911R is at least £100k more than that, but if you’re going to market something as lightweight, then it should not weigh the same as 23 people (average adult weight globally is 62 kilograms). The average weight of a (female) cow is 720 kilograms, which is two Carrera Ts. A five-foot Steinway ‘City’ grand piano weighs 252 kilograms, which means that a 911 Carrera T with some fuel weighs roughly the same as six Steinway grand pianos.
“Improved power to weight ratio delivers enhanced performance,” says Stuttgart, and no doubt the 0-60 time of 4.5 seconds – one tenth quicker than the standard Carrera – is quicker than a baby grand, unless the piano is travelling downwards in a straight line towards the pavement. I also like the cool range of colours including Racing Yellow, Miami Blue and Lava Orange: difficult to choose between those three. But something is not right with this T badge.
Everyone knows that the volume sellers are where Porsche makes its money: Macan, Cayenne and Panamera. The 911 remains a desirable car, but are these editions serious, or are they just preening for press releases? The truth is that, these days, if you really want a lightweight Porsche – and trust me, you do – you have to build it yourself. For the £85k cost of a standard Carrera T, one could easily build a lightweight air-cooled 911 and have enough left over to buy a nice grand piano or two. Now that’s an idea I can get with.
The new 911 Carrera T is available to order now from Porsche Centres in the UK and Ireland priced from £85,576.00 RRP inc VAT. First deliveries begin in January 2018, at which point, journos will be freaking out over the transformative effect of the shorter final drive and claiming this as a credible alternative to a GT3 Touring.
News update: my 1976 911 has a shorter final drive, as does every 911 rally car ever. When the national speed limit of 70mph is being ever more rigorously enforced, it is not rocket science to shorten the final drive and have more fun getting to a lower top speed.
I would like to drive this T: I suspect it actually will be rather more invigorating than a standard Carrera. Group test pitch for GT Porsche magazine: my 1020-kilo 3-litre 911 versus six grand pianos with 370 horsepower. Simon will love it.
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Porsche has unveiled a triptych of new special-edition 911s celebrating three British racing drivers who have taken Porsche to the top step of the podium at the Le Mans 24 Hours. The British Legends series honours Richard Attwood, Nick Tandy and Derek Bell.
British Legends: Richard Attwood
Richard Attwood helped claim Porsche’s first Le Mans victory in 1970. Driving a theoretically outdated 4.5-litre 917 in the Porsche family colours of Salzburg Racing, Attwood and partner, Hans Herrmann, outlasted many other competitors including the newer 4.9-litre 917s to reach the finish first. Just sixteen of the original fifty-one starters took the chequered flag.
Herrmann – a Porsche factory driver from the early 1950s – had promised his wife that a Le Mans win would be his last ever race. After the race, he kept his word and retired, much to the surprise of his Salzburg team bosses. Attwood raced another 917 at Le Mans in 1971, finished second and retired at the end of the season. Attwood currently features in a Porsche 928 racing video.
British Legends: Nick Tandy
After a blistering early career in Ministox and single seaters (Formula Ford and F3), Bedford-born rockstar and Porsche tart extraordinaire, Nick Tandy, first blipped on Weissach’s radar with an exceptional Carrera Cup debut at Dijon for Konrad Motorsport in 2009. Despite no testing beforehand, Tandy finished second in this round of the highly competitive Carrera Cup Germany, so Konrad invited him back for the Abu Dhabi race, where he impressed them again and earned himself a full season Carrera Cup drive for 2010.
Tandy went from strength to strength in 2010, narrowly missing the title to Rene Rast, who was insanely quick: the pair were the class of the field. The championship was Tandy’s in 2011, at which stage he shifted to the world stage, ending up in Porsche’s LMP programme and taking his first Le Mans win for Weissach in 2015 alongside Earl Bamber and Nico Hülkenberg. He continues to be a key part of the Porsche works driver squad.
British Legends: Derek Bell
Born in leafy Pinner in 1941, Derek Reginald Bell went on to claim five wins at Le Mans – four of them with Porsche – and remains Britain’s winningest Le Mans racer.
Bell’s first Le Mans 24 was in 1970: the same race won by Richard Attwood in a Porsche 917. Driving alongside Ronnie Peterson in a works Ferrari 512S, the duo was forced to retire from the race, but Bell stayed on afterwards to help his friend Steve McQueen film the classic: “Le Mans”. The 512 used in the film caught fire with Bell in it, and he narrowly escaped with minor burns.
DB’s most memorable successes at La Sarthe came when teamed with Jacky Ickx. The pair claimed victory for Mirage in 1975 and then for Porsche in 1981 and 1982. Bell’s other Porsche Le Mans wins came in 1986 and 1987, alongside Hans Stuck and Al Holbert.
Carrera GTS ‘British Legends’
The ‘British Legends’ 991s are based on 991 Carrera 4 GTS models and come with options including LED headlights, Sport Design body styling and satin-finish mirrors, lots of carbon and a Union Jack badge on each car with the driver’s signature alongside. Porsche says:
“Using the design of the winning race cars as the starting point of each car, joint workshops between Porsche Cars GB and the drivers ensured their passion was built-in to each 911. The ideas were then taken forward by the design team at Style Porsche in Weissach and the craftsmen at Porsche Exclusive Manufaktur in Stuttgart.
“Each British Legends Edition is finished intricately by hand in the new Porsche Exclusive Manufaktur workshop. Special features such as the Satin finish black door mirrors, carbon floor mats with Alcantara edging and a steering column casing in Alcantara make their first appearance on this 911.”
The 911 Carrera 4 GTS British Legends Edition is on sale from 9 October, priced at £122,376 inc VAT for Attwood Red – add an extra £900 for Tandy White or Bell Blue paint. A bargain! Whatever about the cars, there is no doubt that all three drivers are proper Porsche legends so it’s great to see them get the hat tip of a special edition. Watch the video below – it has some nice archive stuff in it:
No fan of Porsche racing will have enjoyed the recent news that former Porsche R&D supremo, Wolfgang Hatz, had been arrested in connection with ongoing investigations into the Volkswagen diesel emissions cheating scandal.
Hatz’ arrest is not the first in this story and will not be the last. The most detailed piece I have read regarding Hatz was on Arstechnica, in an article which said the former VW and Audi engine chief was the fourth arrest made so far in relation to the dieselgate scandal:
“Hatz, who is reportedly being held without bail, is the fourth VW Group employee to be arrested in connection with the scandal (VW Group as an entity pleaded guilty to violating the Clean Air Act in early 2017). James Liang, a former VW engineer, was arrested in 2016 in the US and sentenced to 40 months in prison; Oliver Schmidt, a German emissions compliance executive who worked in the US, was arrested in Miami in December; and Zaccheo Giovanni Pamio, an Italian citizen who was the former chief of thermodynamics in Audi’s engine development department, was arrested in Germany earlier this year.”
One senses the growing inevitability of further arrests amongst former or current board members. Exactly what punishment might be meted out to directors and board members convicted of wrongdoing is unknown, but the situation continues to be closely monitored by many news outlets. VW’s (presumably vast) media spend to underpin positive public perception of the organisation has not brought the carmaker out of the woods just yet.
Knowing that one of the people at the very top of Porsche Motorsport success has been arrested for allegedly cheating air quality regulations leaves an unpleasant taste. It is also very hard to accept that Volkswagen remains the only car manufacturer that has ever done this sort of thing, so who is investigating the rest of them?
Diesel Emissions effect on Porsche SE
Two years after the emissions scandal broke, Porsche SE continues to feel the pain. When Volkswagen recently announced further “negative special items” (i.e. big numbers in red ink) of more than €2.5 billion due to the ongoing emissions crisis, Porsche SE – which holds more than 30% of VW’s shares – announced that this would inevitably hit its own profits, which were now expected to land somewhere between €2.1 and 3.1 billion.
Summing up SE’s press release in the words of Monty Python’s Black Knight, missing the first arm: “I’ve had worse.”
Porsche has decided to shut down its LMP1 programme from the end of 2017 and switch to Formula E from 2019. The 911 RSR GT programme continues and Weissach will focus on bringing the 911 back to the head of the field.
It is not a huge surprise that Porsche has canned its hugely expensive LMP1 programme after two back-to-back titles. The promotion value of the effort has already begun to tail off and, with France and the UK already planning to ban new sales of petrol engined cars from 2040, the motor industry focus is clearly on electric cars now. The next twenty years will see a revolution in motoring with autonomous cars, electric vehicles and further downsizing as more households run just one car, or no car at all.
These trends are still in their infancies, but as momentum grows behind renewables of all sorts and the exploding global population requires an ever-cleaner world in order to survive, manufacturers will not wish to be seen as irrelevant in the clean air/electric car landscape. While the racing in Formula E is nothing to get really excited about right now, the series offers a reasonable option for brand positioning (many Porsche competitors are already there), not to mention the cross-R&D advantages to those who need to train a bunch of engineers and maximise the development curve of renewable drivetrains.
Porsche says that the shift from FIA WEC to Formula E is “derived from the direction set out for the company in Porsche Strategy 2025, which will see Porsche develop a combination of pure GT vehicles and fully electric sports cars, such as the first fully battery-powered Mission E road car”.
“Entering Formula E and achieving success in this category are the logical outcomes of our Mission E,” says Michael Steiner, head of Research and Development at Porsche AG. “The growing freedom for in-house technology developments makes Formula E attractive to us. Porsche is working with alternative, innovative drive concepts. For us, Formula E is the ultimate competitive environment for driving forward the development of high-performance vehicles in areas such as environmental friendliness, efficiency and sustainability”.
Contrary to what you may read in today’s press, the UK’s greatest festival of motoring held in the grounds of an old country house doesn’t start for another three weeks. Roll on July 22nd, and the Festival of the Unexceptional at Stowe House in Buckinghamshire.
Keep your manufacturer-sponsored traffic jams and exhibition runs up the garden path for friends of his lordship. Instead, cue the oddball and unloved motors of our youth: the stuff that sensible people scrapped when the repair bills at MOT time topped £100 and were therefore more than the cars were worth, all those years ago.
Festival of the Unexceptional
First held in 2014, the Festival of the Unexceptional is a grand day out for fans of the ordinary. Witness a Light Blue 1.6-litre Honda Quintet and wonder how you ever forgot they existed. Spy a Pale Green 1.3-litre Ford Escort and remember how the neighbours took you and your sister to see Snow White at the cinema in an identical model (No? Just me, then).
Previous winners of the Concours de l’Ordinaire –a competition of fifty of the best examples of unexceptional cars built between 1966 and 1989 – include a Nissan Cherry Europe, a Morris Marina pick-up truck, and a Hillman Avenger Super Estate, all of which get my vote for working class motoring eye candy. I am very excited to see what turns up this year.
Will we find Porsches at the 2017 Festival of the Unexceptional? By rights, yes, we certainly should. Stuttgart made its fair share of unexceptional vehicles to 1990 (the show’s cut-off point) and I have driven a healthy proportion of all those produced. But this could be classed as treasonable talk nowadays, especially in front of potential ‘investors’.
Unexceptional Porsche – Judge’s Choice
My wet-dream Porsche for top honours at Stowe would be the pic at the top: a nice early RHD 924 Lux in Yellow with the basic alloys and a straight, simple spec. A natty little car in anyone’s book but unexceptional in the great scheme of things. However, now that 924s are changing hands for silly money, some 924 folk have sought to rewrite their steeds’ proletarian roots. Perish the thought of putting pop-up Porsche lights to an unexceptional grindstone for these proud PCGB’ers.
I have no such aversions and would happily run any Porsche of mine to this festival long before I ever considered taking one to the Festival of Greed. Mrs G and I have discussed getting the 924 Turbo over to the Stowe car park for a day on the lawns. I’m sure it will make for a grand day out if I can get the water pump back on, timing belt replaced and all the fuel injection shoved back into place in the few days I have free between now and then.
Who needs UK reg plates when it’s back roads to Stowe all the way from here? Famous last words – don’t you just love them…
Leaked pics of the new Porsche 991 GT2 RS are currently doing the rounds online ahead of the car’s official release, which apparently is happening this weekend. Presumably that will be at Goodwood.
Some people get very excited about new top-end Porsches. While the car looks great, I see what happens with these cars after they are delivered and a life of rarified storage is nothing to freak out about. For a few months after launch, journos rave about them, snappers glorify them, magazine readers drool over them but what does it all add up to? Ultimately this is just another quick Porsche in a world of quick Porsches and most will never go far.
I know a couple of people who buy these things and drive the crap out of them (fair play, and I look forward to the passenger rides), but it’s also the case that lots of the people who manage to acquire one of these upper-atmosphere supercars tell me they are ultimately bored by them. Once they’ve had it delivered and done a few miles, they are just new cars with too much driver-isolating technology to be consistently interesting at regular speeds. Hence all the low mileage examples sitting around in showrooms five years down the line.
Much of the time, the thrill was in the chase: getting one’s name in the order book. The car eventually arrives, sits around going up in value and comes back to the market at double the price, then another manufacturer releases their latest and greatest new model, prices for the older toys start to go soft and the whole game starts again.
Some people eventually get fed up with it and want to get off the dealership treadmill. It’s a bit like the iPhone upgrade cycle. Eventually the gains are so marginal and the upshot in ownership experience so minimal that you just stay where you are, or maybe even go backwards. Dump the new tech for old tech: Apple Watch goes for a Rolex, GT2 RS gets sacked for an early 911 instead.
I get regular emails asking about the ideal spec for a light, fast, no-frills early 911 and am currently involved with a 911 hot rod build for a chap who has owned just about every hypercar you can imagine. He has all the money a person could want – certainly much more than I would ever want – but finds nothing in new cars to hold his attention. Now he just wants something with character and an old Porsche is the ideal first step. After that it might be a trick little Alfa, old BMW or maybe an E-Type with muscle car running gear.
The true thrill of driving does not need a new GT2 RS. A person can find it in plenty of other places without needing to do the order book rain dance. But as there is no doubt that it is a badass automobile, here are some pics!
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