Lexus adds strikingly unusual SC430 coupe/convertible to fleet
Nobody questions Toyota’s ability to make exceptional vehicles, with quality, workmanship and efficiency of performance that is unexcelled. Similarly, nobody was surprised when Toyota raised its own bar of production when it started its upscale Lexus line, with costlier vehicles that were even better and captured a large share of the market for consumers willing to spend a little more to get something special.
The LS430 is the latest version of the Lexus flagship, and its similarity to the best Mercedes luxury sedans is unmistakable, including the $50,000-plus sticker prices, and the smooth-running V8 power that drives the rear wheels. That’s fine for smooth cruising, and luxury, but it is a bit less than fine if you happen to be caught in an Up North snowstorm, as I was, during my week with the big sedan.
Last week, I got an opportunity to drive the new Lexus SC430, which is a sports-coupe version of the LS430. It is an unusual-looking sporty car, and it is an attention-grabber.
Advertising types get a bit nervous when the road-test subject is a car that is scarce, or not sold in the immediate area, even though I counter with evidence that people enjoy reading about fantasy vehicles as much as about the inexpensive subcompact they may be buying on a real-world budget.
I bring up that item, because the SC430 I drove undoubtedly was the first of its kind to enter the city limits of Duluth, and yet it attracted tremendous attention every time I stopped at a red light or to park. Those who didn’t know what the heck it was wanted to, but I was most surprised at how many people knew exactly what it was, having read about it in magazines or in advertisements from auto show exposure of the SC430.
One astute observer was a high school girl who stopped me to solicit a contribution for starving kids in Peru. After I had made a small donation, she admitted that she mainly just wanted to get an up-close and personal look at the SC430, because she already had collected several photos of it, her dream car, and was dazzled to get a chance to actually see one.
The styling of the SC430 is a departure for Lexus. It is a blunt little car, with bold but rounded edges, fore and aft, and a sleekly rounded aluminum roof that sweeps stylishly rearward. There is a distinct similarity to the Audi TT coupe when you examine the SC430, and it apparently is intended. That means it is ultramodern in design and performance, but there is definitely a retro air about it.
Under the hood is the smooth and powerful 4.3-liter V8, with variable valve timing, dual overhead camshafts, four valves per cylinder, and a quiet — almost silent — rush of power when you hit the gas. The high-tech engine puts out 300 horsepower at 5,600 RPMs and 325 foot-pounds of torque at 3,400. That’s a good disparity, because the torque launches you, and the high-revving capability means you are well on toward the top of the horsepower curve before you run out of low-end torque.
All that power runs through a 5-speed automatic that shifts more smoothly than sporty. Coupled with the quiet excellence of that 32-valve V8 engine, you can be moving much more swiftly, much sooner than you realize. Frankly, I’d prefer a little more roar out of that engine, as you head on up to the conservative 6,350-RPM redline. I enjoy fast cars as much or more than most people, but I like to have the audible sensation to help indicate when you’re getting on up there in revs and speed.
But this is not an all-out sports car, even if it performs like one. It’s more of a luxury-with-sport vehicle, aimed at cars like the Mercedes CLK430.
The SC430, however, will go 0-60 in a mere 5.9 seconds, which is in the neighborhood of all-out performance cars like Porsche or Corvette, and well beyond the capabilities of luxury coupes. All of that comes at a cost, and the SC430’s sticker price starts at $58,000 and zooms over the $60,000 mark quickly, if you add the navigation system and the sophisticated traction-control devices.
Handling is excellent, although I found the steering a bit too light from power boosting. Suspension is double-wishbone both front and rear, and huge, 18-inch aluminum wheels are shod with low-profile high-performance tires designed to run up to 100 miles per hour even if they go flat.
The flashiest thing about the SC430 is that you can push a button on the center dash panel and the sleekly rounded aluminum roof rises up and deposits itself under the trunklid. That transforms a very slippery coupe into a stunning open-top roadster. The trunklid opens from the front, clamshell-like, and devours the folding roof as smooth as you’d like. First, though, you have to pull back a screen in the trunk and fasten it just so into two little slots, which complete the electrical connection to allow the dash switch to work.
It refused to lower the roof on my first half-dozen tries, which made me think it was smarter than I was, for trying to turn a hardtop into a roadster in 40-degree weather. Turns out, I had too much stuff in the trunk, and the screen, which is like a horizontal window shade, wouldn’t fit flush enough to signal the top that it could retreat. Once I cleared out the trunk, it worked smoothly.
Of course, that also wipes out the trunk-space, which is impressive with the top up. It is larger, let’s say, than the legroom for the rear seats. Yes, the SC430 is technically a four-place car, but the rear seat legroom makes it uninhabitable for human beings.
Inside, the SC430 has generous supplies of bird’s-eye maple and leather, and both the wood and the leather are of a class of their own in richness. When you sit in the plush leather seat, and first grip the steering wheel, you have to be impressed by the wheel itself, which is highly polished wood and leather.
The instruments are well laid out, and the center dash panel can be completely covered with wood trapdoors, which come out at the push of a button to cover the audio controls.
That audio system is top-shelf, too. It has nine speakers, and a 6-disc CD player built in, and the whole system is made by Mark Levinson, a name that won’t mean anything to you unless you are deeply into the best home audio systems.
While you can cruise or speed to your appointed rounds in luxurious surroundings, listening to your tunes at higher decibel levels than you thought your eardrums could tolerate, you will make an impression that leaves passers-by gaping and pointing.
The front end is sharply raked, with fantastic headlight bulbs built in under sloping lenses, and very impressive foglights housed in lower front ducts that also send cooling air to the front disc brakes. The sculptured lower sides and rising angle to the rear wheelwell are harmonious but unusual, sloping quickly down at the rear.
The taillights are slits that also are housed nicely in the bodywork, and there’s an arching spoiler over the rear lip of the trunklid. A large, almost massive, rear bumper has a lower lip, through which two large, businesslike tailpipes protrude.
At first, I found the SC430 to look unusual, and while I liked it, I wasn’t dazzled in the way the Audi TT is dazzling. But the SC430 is easier to like as you drive it, and you become more and more impressed as you witness the impact it seems to have on everybody who gets within sight of it.
The big Lexus LS430, on the other hand, is a large and impressive sedan, that looks and acts a lot like a Mercedes and has 290 horsepower from the same engine. While it is understated to the point of looking classy but unspectacular, the LS430 is equally loaded with fine touches inside.
The problem with both cars is that, despite the most sophisticated traction-control devices, the rear-wheel drive can reduce contenders for the honor of the world’s finest cars to futility while some inexpensive front-wheel-drivers zoom by in icy conditions on steep hills.
The SC430 in particular would feel even more impressive with an all-wheel-drive system, but that’s not likely. Besides, Lexus has taken clear aim at Mercedes, so copying something so Audi quattro-ish is out of the question.
Of course, when it’s icy and snowy, you can’t be dropping that aluminum roof down out of the way, either. So you leave it in the garage when winter is howling, and enjoy the heck out of it in good weather. Fantasy cars are intended for such missions.
Tight-fitting Stratus R/T coupe is a good fit even in tight economy
The first impression about driving the new Dodge Stratus R/T coupe is tightness.
It feels tight when you climb aboard and fit, just right, in those leather bucket seats. The driver’s compartment fits nice and tightly too, with steering controls and instruments laid out efficiently. When you slam the door shut, there is more evidence of the tightness of the Stratus’s construction — the door has a solid sound as it closes.
The tight feeling increases when you start the engine, and the 24-valve V6 comes to life with an impressive snarl. Not a race car snarl, but meaningful-usable power snarl. The 4-speed automatic transmission is impressive, too, and you are startled at first at how abruptly you launch from a dead stop, and how tight-feeling the shifts are — no sloppiness.
Now put the Stratus R/T through some tight turns, and that trademark tightness is reinforced yet again. The Stratus R/T cuts sharply and stays flat, glued to the road no matter how aggressively you might throw it into a corner. Try a zig-zag pattern, and that tight, coordinated feeling comes through yet again. All the pieces feel integrated, and the overall impression is that of a well-refined coupe. The 17-inch alloy wheels, with performance-oriented Goodyear tires mounted, helps the feel along.
The last tight feeling is when you stop, and the 4-wheel disc brakes haul you down swiftly and surely.
There are reasons for all that tightness. The new Stratus had more than a couple of interesting challenges before being introduced this year. The first challenge is the hotly contested market segment, where such cars as Mustang, Camaro, Firebird, Pontiac Grand Am, and a whole herd of Japanese sporty coupes, such as the Integra, Accord, Mitsubishi Eclipse and others were primed and ready.
Another challenge is that Dodge had come out with a neat coupe called the Avenger for the 1995 model year. It was a nice car, roomy inside and stylish outside, with a forward slant that promised impressive performance. And for Up North drivers, it was a good idea, because of its front-wheel-drive concept, which was a large one-up on such front-engine/rear-drive vehicles as Mustang and Camaro. The style of the Avenger would be tough to improve upon, and the name change to Stratus would have to be smooth..
Still another hurdle to clear was that Dodge and Chrysler were redoing their compact/intermediate cars, and the new coupes would be introduced alongside all-new Dodge Stratus and Chrysler Sebring sedans. So the coupe would have to follow along with the sedan styling cues, and wind up as the sportier side of the new vehicle lines.
The Stratus R/T indicates that Dodge pulled off the coup. Sort of the “coup of coupes,” if you will.
From a styling standpoint, I think the Stratus R/T looks far more performance-oriented than the Avenger, and a very important difference is that the Stratus R/T delivers on the promise, while the Avenger never did. A power boost from 163 to 200 horsepower, and to 205 foot-pounds of torque was accomplished by upgrading from the small 2.5-liter V6 to a 3.0-liter engine, with single overhead camshafts operating four valves per cylinder.
The sporty look starts with the trademark Dodge cross-hair grille, with its Viper/Intrepid/Ram truck heritage, and sweeps back from that rounded nose to a passenger compartment outlined by a steeply sloped windshield and then a gracefully arching roofline that tapers nicely into the rear quarters. The uplifted tail borrows heavily from the impressive rear look of the Intrepid and is a vast improvement over the nice but unremarkable rear of the Avenger.
Such elements as flaring the wheelwells and the lower side sills add a sporty touch as well. Dodge designers were assigned to come up with a look that would break away from the boring sameness that can confront you when you walk into a crowded parking lot, and to come up with a style that stands out. I think they managed very well. But the beauty of the Stratus R/T coupe is more than skin-deep.
STIFFNESS FOR SAFETY
First off, the Stratus coupe body is much more rigid than the Avenger by 90 percent in bending and 9 percent in the twisting of torsional rigidity. Those figures are impressive, and they indicate how flexible the Avenger was as well as how much it has been tightened. To tighten the steering and handling, the front struts have been affixed by braces, and front and rear stabilizer bars have been added to reduce the vehicles’ roll tendencies.
The MacPherson strut front suspension design is complemented by a double-wishbone rear suspension layout, and the whole thing comes together in that tight-handling feel. Such agility is an added safety feature, and safety was another primary concern of Dodge engineers. The Stratus R/T coupe starts with a high-tensile beam in the front bumper for first protection from a frontal impace. Then it has lower body side-members of thick, high-tensile steel running along both sides, designed to absorb the blow from a frontal impact and diffuse it away from the passenger cabin through the side sills.
The more rigid body also helps protect occupants, and an energy-absorbing pad is mounted behind the door trim, with strengthened center structural pillars and higher and wider side sills, all designed around the one-piece reinforcement materials surrounding both door openilngs.
The coupes also were designed with a safety cage network of beams and pillars by computer technology to defend against intruding forces, and front, rear, side and offset collisions were used in testing.
Energy-absorbing tubes are mounted int eh front and center pillars and foam padding in the headliner and rear pillars to help protect against head injuries.
On top of that, supplemental restraints are high-tech, with improved seat harnesses that have load-limiting capability, which read the severity of an impact and allow better upper torso protection. The airbags are called “next-generation,” which is a widely used and unfortunate term that makes us wonder what the next generation of airbags will be called.
For security, the ignition key has a built-in transponder and the key ring antenna on the steering lock must read it correctly to allow the engine to start. That prevents forged key or hot-wire starts and should eliminate a lot of theft problems.
While the front buckets are supportive and comfortable, and adjustable from every which angle, the rear seat room is also noteworthy for a sporty coupe, where the terms “rear-seat” and “room” generally can’t be used in the same sentence. In the Stratus R/T, front headroom is 38.5 inches, rear headroom is 36 inches; front legroom is 42.3, rear legroom 34; front shoulder room 52.2 inches, rear shoulder room 52.4. Very impressive.
Also, the rear seat is placed slightly higher than the front, so rear occupants have a chance to actually see out the front. Access to the rear seat is enhanced by the front passenger seat, which glides forward several inches when you flip the backrest forward. The driver’s bucket doesn’t slide forward, but it does tilt forward easily at the touch of a button, and returns to the same angle when you put it back.
SIMILAR, YET DIFFERENT
As similar as the Stratus sedan and coupe are, they are distinctly different under the skin. Chrysler Corporation has had to become a team player since being assimilated into Mercedes-Benz, but Chrysler also has pulled off one of the neater bits of teamwork with Mitsubishi in the development and production of the Stratus. At a glance, the Stratus sedan and coupe look identical, just with 4 doors or 2 doors.
Mitsubishi, which for years made V6 engines for Chrysler minivans and built the Avenger and Sebring in their previous incarnations, worked jointly with Chrysler designers on this project. The Stratus sedans are built by Chrysler, of Chrysler design, and with Chrysler engines and transmissions — including the splendid 2.7-liter V6. The Stratus coupes are also of Chrysler design, but built by Mitsubishi at the Normal, Ill., plant, using Mitsubishi engines and transmissions.
That means the 3.0-liter V6 in the Stratus R/T is Mitsubishi’s jewel-smooth engine, and the transmissions are either a 5-speed manual or a 4-speed automatic. I think the Chrysler 2.7 V6 is one of the best engines ever built by a U.S. manufacturer, but the Mitsubishi engine, along with being very smooth and benefitting by the refinement of a decade of use worldwide, also has a lot of spunk. While driving it hard, frequently up to the 6,000 redline, I got 27 miles per gallon on the highway and a solid 24.8 in predominately city driving.
There is an interesting aside to the transmission differences, too. Both sedan and coupe can be had with Chrysler’s “AutoStick” manually shiftable automatic. Porsche was first to design such a transmission, the Tiptronic, and other manufacturers who want to copy the spring-loaded fore-and-aft shift motion to upshift or downshift must pay rights fees to Porsche. Chrysler chose not to, so on Chrysler AutoSticks, the spring-loaded shifter works left-to-right rather than fore-and-aft. Mitsubishi paid, so its transmission, the one in the Stratus R/T coupe, has the more logical fore-and-aft motion.
But beware. When you drop it into the slot for manual shifting, it downshifts to first by itself, but it won’t upshift until you shift it. And when you start up in first, it snaps your neck from the surge.
All in all, the Stratus R/T coupe is an impressive package. The test car I had was “satin white pearl coat,” a glistening white that stood out against the blue sky on one day, and when backdropped by the stormy seas of Lake Superior on the next. You can find a basic Stratus coupe for around $16,000, but with all the amenities, the upgraded R/T lists for $20,805. That includes all sorts of sporty improvements. The test car also added leather seats, 6-way power driver seat, antilock 4-wheel disc brakes, the AutoStick transmission, a power sunroof, and the in-dash 4-disc CD player over and above the impressive sound system, and the total tally was $24,860.
The economy is tight right now, so there are some rebates and low-interest deals on the Stratus models. Not bad. The economy may be tight, but the Stratus R/T coupe is one of the tightest cars you can find. Looks sporty, and drives sportier, which makes the extra money for the R/T well-spent.
The time to lower drunk-driving limit is here again, and past due
They were good friends of our family, and I had coached their son in youth hockey, soccer and baseball in the northern suburbs of the Twin Cities. Their daughter, a high school girl, went for a ride with a girlfriend to check on Christmas gifts. They pulled up to a crossing divided highway and stopped at the sign, then continued straight ahead, across the southbound lane, then across the northbound lane.
They didn’t make it. A man driving a pickup truck was coming fast. Too fast. And he hit their car broadside. The girl, the daughter of our family’s friends, was killed instantly. The driver of the pickup truck was drunk. Seriously drunk. He didn’t even realize there had been a collision.
It’s happened to you too, I’m sure, or to someone you know well. An innocent victim, killed unfairly, needlessly, by a drunk driver. Maybe you can recall several cases, but any are too many.
Statistics show such alcohol-related violations occur in more than half the fatal accidents. And in most cases, the drunk driver is seriously drunk, well beyond any legal limit.
Where will it stop? The easy answer is zero tolerance. They do it in other countries, where drunk drivers lose their right to drive, or serve jail time, or suffer heavy financial penalties, and they’ve pretty well done away with drinking and driving.
That probably won’t happen in the U.S., or in Minnesota, because drinking — social drinking, nightclub hopping, having a few belts with dinner — is too ingrained in our society to be extinguished. Having a designated driver is the easy way out, but most people who have had too much to drink don’t think it’s too much, and when their ability to reason is compromised by alcohol, their ability to make such judgments are seriously impaired.
We all have known people like that, too, or maybe some of us have even been in that position, where no protests by friends — those kind of friends who subscribe to the phrase “friends don’t let friends drive drunk” — will convince them they are unsafe.
In Minnesota, the amount of alcohol you can consume before you’re legally drunk can reach 0.10. There have been several very interesting experiments in recent years where media people, and legislators, have experimented. Some people can function quite well at 0.10, others are bombed out of their minds and can’t walk a straight line at that level, let alone drive with reasonable safety.
In other states, the limit is 0.08, stricter by a small amount, but significant, nonetheless. If states will change to a universally accepted 0.08, they will get their full share of federal funding for highway use; if they don’t, they stand to lose it.
Seems like a no-brainer, but in the Minnesota legislature, there are those who have balked at passing the stricter regulation.
Why? We can only guess. The alcohol and restaurant lobby is strong, and vociferous, and those lobbyists hit the legislators hard and often, complaining that such a tightening of the law won’t save any lives. Really, they only mean that the special interests they serve might lose a few customers if those customers can’t drink as much as they’d like and then go out and then become potential hazards on the roadways.
It happens that I don’t drink. Never have. So when I suggest tighter laws against drunk driving, it sounds like I have an agenda. I do. I don’t ever want to have to make that phone call, or stop by the visitation, to try to offer comfort to a family that can’t find any comfort from the ache of having an innocent member killed by a drinking driver.
My agenda is for more highway safety. And my reasoning is that a social drinker at a bar or restaurant knows when he’s had a couple drinks, and if he or she thinks that the amount consumed is within safe guidelines, he or she might have one more for the road. My belief is that if the law said 0.08 instead of 0.10, that same person might decide to NOT have that one more for the road, or might even make that one more black coffee, in order to be within the lower limit.
I am not saying booze should be illegal, although I would love to see a nightclub or bar that has a little lounge by the door, a coffee lounge, with real good, gourmet coffee. As you go to leave, there’s a breath-o-lizer, just like the cops use, to check your level of alcohol consumption. If it’s too high, or marginally close, you spend another 20 minutes in the coffee lounge, drinking a little coffee and continuing to socialize. It would be a fun way to end a night out, and it would make the roadways a whole lot safer for us all.
The most celebrated alcohol-related fatality in Minnesota in the last year was the tragic death of Minnesota Timberwolves player Malik Sealy, who was driving home, southbound on Hwy. 100 in the western suburbs of the Twin Cities, when a drunk driver circled down onto the wrong lane, and was coming northbound in the southbound lane. Both were in trucks, and they collided head-on, and Sealy was killed.
It was indeed tragic, and the Timberwolves retired Sealy’s No. 2 jersey, and the players have repeatedly honored their fallen friend with tributes. The guilty driver had a whopping blood-alcohol level, nearly 0.20 — about twice the legal limit. Sealy, the reports said, had “only” a 0.08 level. Teammates said he was celebrating a birthday with them, and had maybe two glasses of champagne, hours earlier, and spent the most recent few hours in a no-drinking strip joint with teammates before heading home, at nearly 4 a.m.
It’s convenient, and it’s still tragic, to heap the blame on the repeat offender coming the wrong way. But tests show that smaller, lighter people might get to 0.08 with only a few drinks, while larger people must drink quite a bit more than that to get to 0.08. People the size of NBA basketball players may have to drink significantly more to get up to 0.08.
The point I’m making is that everybody is insisting that Sealy was innocent, because he was only at 0.08. We can only speculate that if he was at 0.00, or maybe 0.05, he might have been able to make a reaction, maybe just to recognize the impending disaster a split second sooner, and might have been able to take evasive action. We’ll never know.
But Sealy’s 0.08 level of blood alcohol, it must painfully be pointed out, would have made him legally drunk in a lot of states, and in Minnesota, if we had adopted the previous attempts to lower our limit of the law.
Maybe, just maybe, if Minnesota had a 0.08 limit, Malik Sealy would have had less to drink, or might have gone home earlier, or might otherwise have avoided a painful tragedy, in which a well-known and popular drunk driver was killed by an unknown drunker driver.
The liquor lobbyists don’t like to hear that sort of thing. They are eloquent and forceful in their presentation of how harmless it is to be drinking to 0.08 and driving. They protest whenever anything is written to suggest otherwise, and they go to the legislature and convince the fine people serving us all that there is no benefit in lowering the standard.
We don’t know all the methods they use to convince legislators to vote it down. Who knows? Maybe they take the representatives and senators out for a few belts, just to have a good time, and subtlely lay down a sinister little reminder, of how often legislators themselves might be arrested on their way home from such gatherings.
So they vote it down, and outfits like Mothers Against Drunk Driving end up wailing uselessly, and even end up being branded as radical do-gooders who are against having a good ol’ time.
I would like to propose another resolution that has absolutely no chance of being passed by the legislature. I would like to see those legislators who vote against lowering the limit from 0.10 to 0.08, and those liquor lobbyists who convince such voters, to be listed on a new committee. The job of that committee would be that they, along with you and I, be designated to go to the homes of the next innocent victims of drunk drivers, and that it be made mandatory that those same committee members also attend the funerals of those victims.
After all, they’re supposedly representing what’s good for the populace, and we’d just be extending their constituency to also include people who can never vote again.
[cutlines for stratus r/t column…]
Here are cutlines with the Dodge Stratus R/T column:
1/ The Dodge Stratus R/T coupe was at ease, even while Lake Superior resembled an Up North hurricane.
2/ Stratus instrument panel is well laid out, except for those encased in weird tunnels angling away from driver’s view.
3/ The center vents can be tilted and angled every which way, including closed, above heat-air and audio controls.
4/ The sleek silhouette of the Stratus R/T coupe is designed to outline the tight redesign new-for-2001.
5/ The sporty, upraised rear of the Stratus coupe features large, bright taillights.
Touring Texas track in five Porsches too much of a good thing
[[[[CUTLINES:
1/ An array of new Porsches for a group test-drive at Texas World Speedway ranged from the Carrera Turbo 6-speed, to the Carrera Turbo Tiptronic, to the Carrera Cabrio, the Boxster S, and the base Boxster.
2/ The 911 Carrera 4 Tiptronic stayed on the infield road course while stock car zealots could pay to drive simulated NASCAR stock cars on the outer banked oval.
3/ The 911 Carrera Turbo prepared for a driver change, while condos costing up to a half-million loomed in the background.
4/ A gathering of Porsches waiting for the track to clear for some hot laps.
5/ Race driver Richard Spenard patiently waited to provide instruction in the Boxster S.
6/ Tiptronic controls feature steering-wheel thumb controls for the $115,000 Carrera 4 Turbo with automatic transmission.
7/ Light tan leather and wood trim set apart the luxurious Carrera Cabrio.
8/ The condominiums in Turn 3, and the backdrop of stock cars on the oval didn’t alter the focus of driving the 911 Turbo on the infield road course. ]]]]]]]
FORT WORTH, TEXAS—Texas World Speedway rises out of a windswept prairie in northern Texas, somewhere between Dallas and Fort Worth, which are a pair of Texas “twin cities” much like Minneapolis and St. Paul, or Duluth and Superior. Dallas is the swanky, sophisticated business capital, while Fort Worth is basically still quite similar to the stockyard-dominated cowtown it was a century ago.
The race course, however, is a surprisingly modern structure, with something over 120 air-conditioned suites stringing along the upper level of the main grandstand, which runs from Turn 4 to Turn 1 and all along the straightaway in between on the high-banked, high-speed oval. Over behind Turn 3, there is another high, modernistic structure —condominiums, where you can live for something under a half-million dollars, and you can look out your front window and have the finest view of the races anywhere.
The Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART) series, by far the most sophisticated and fastest racing series in North America, will run the third race of its season at Texas World Speedway this weekend, just a week after a couple of groups of automotive journalists were summoned to the same place. It must be exciting to run a CART car around the high-banked oval, where you can stay flat-out all the way around, but I would venture to say we had a lot more fun.
Our purpose for being there was put together by Porsche, the German automaker of fine and exclusive sports cars. Being a small company, Porsche can’t get out the number of press-fleet vehicles of larger manufacturers, so it decided it might be more efficient to bring all five of its models to one site, and then bring in the automotive media to examine them all, at one time and together.
Porsche was smart enough to not allow the media types to get loose on the high-banked course. We were restricted to the small, 9-turn road-racing circuit laid out on the infield of the place. It is short, something less than a mile and a half, and the twists and turns are challenging, while close together enough to prevent you from getting up to too high a speed.
These Porsches are all high-speed vehicles, and they’d love to let their power hang out on an autobahn with no speed limit, but they are at their best when they also can display their incredible handling capabilities interspersed with snarling bursts of acceleration. So a road-racing course, even a short one, makes a lot more sense than merely running up to top speed. Besides, you’d need an air-strip to do it.
Meanwhile, the roaring sounds that dominated the place came from a group of NASCAR-style stock cars. It turned out that the Richard Petty Driving School was going on around the oval. Customers pay some money, and get a little instruction plus the chance to spend most of an hour driving around the oval in a detuned Winston Cup car.
Meanwhile, we journalists were all attending to business. We were apportioned, three to a professional driver. Porsche endurance racers like Hurley Haywood, Doc Bundy, David Murray, Richard Spenard and others were all there, and I was assigned to Spenard, a French-Canadian from Montreal with a smooth teaching style and a neat accent.
At our disposal, to borrow a phrase, were five Porsches. First, there was the basic Boxster, a silver roadster costing about $41,000. Don’t be alarmed; that’s the bargain Porsche. Introduced as a 1998 model, the Boxster is a volume product for Porsche, and has been revised by increasing its flat-opposed engine displacement from 2.5 to 2.7 liters, boosting horsepower from 201 to 217. It will go 0-60 in 6.5 seconds.
Next up the scale was a bright yellow Boxster S, introduced a year ago in response to critics who thought the Boxster was closer to the mellow Mazda Miata in performance than to upscale sports cars such as the Mercedes SLK, the BMW M3, the Audi TT, and the new Honda S2000. The Boxster S goes up $10,000 to $51,000, and has a 3.2-liter engine with 250 horsepower, plus a 6-speed transmission over the Boxster’s 5-speed, plus stiffened suspension and oversized brakes taken off the 911. Its 0-60 time is 5.8.
The middle of the road model was the Porsche 911 Carrera Cabrio. The 911 retains the old nickname, but it became an all-new car two years ago. At that time, Porsche redesigned the 911 for the first time since 1965, which says a lot about the heritage of building a sensational car for all ages. Porsche traditionalists might have been shocked to learn that the durable, shrieking, air-cooled engine has been replaced by a liquid-cooled engine of 3.4 liters, turning out 300 horsepower. It is a rear-engine/rear-drive layout, in Porsche tradition, and the model turned over to us was a dark green convertible, which is called the Cabrio in Porsche vernacular. The Cabrio, surprisingly, is the largest-selling model of the 911 Carrera. It will go 0-60 in 5.1 seconds.
Then we move up to the big leagues.
The top two models for us to drive were both Carrera Turbo 4s, which mean they have turbocharged 3.6-liter, flat-opposed engines, meaning the cylinders lay out on their side, pumping straight out and back in opposite each other. The Turbo was introduced last summer, but it has a different engine from the normally aspirated Carrera, turning out 415 horsepower.
The difference in the two Carrera Turbos we had is that the silver one had Porsche’s Tiptronic transmission, a smooth-shifting 5-speed automatic that can be placed in an “M” slot, from where you can shift it manually by hand, or you can use the neat little thumb toggle switches — up and you upshift, down and you downshift. What could be easier?
The dark red Carrera Turbo had the smooth 6-speed manual transmission, and, quite naturally, we all muttered about how that would be the trick one, the fastest of the bunch. And it was, covering 0-60 in a mere 4.0 seconds, according to the factory test information.
The new Tiptronic has been upgraded significantly. It used to do a good job of reading the impulses from how you drive it, and holding the shift points for what it figures you’d prefer. Up until last year, the Tiptronic calculated your driving imput on five electronic maps; the new one has 250 maps to constantly calculate how you drive. The Tiptronic allows the 911 Turbo to go 0-60 in 5.0 seconds.
Bob Carlson, Porsche’s director of media relations, informed us all that we were not racing, not even trying to drive fast against ourselves, but we were out to examine the differences among the different models. Smoothness and handling were more important than speed. We would not be wearing helmets, and we would have a professional race driver sitting in the passenger seat to offer tips along the way. Each driver in each group would get about 10 laps at a time, then rotate to another car.
“You will see that these five cars each have their own performance characteristics,” said Carlson.
The infield track started out by sending you from the pits onto the longest straight chute, which ends with a 180-degree curve to the right. Coming out of that, you accelerate toward a cone signifying the shut-down point for Turn 2, which is a fairly hard right turn, followed by a quick left, then another left — Turns 4 and 5 — and then a hard right Turn 6, and a short straight leading into a tight, buttonhook Turn 7, another 180-degree curve. A short straight is followed by a fast left Turn 8, leading to a fast left Turn 9, which zooms past the pit road and sends you back down the straight.
Our group’s first car was the silver-grey Carrera Turbo Tiptronic. It had all-wheel drive and the Tiptronic automatic, which would be OK, but I couldn’t wait for the 6-speed version. I tried two laps in manual, shifting for myself with the thumb shifters. It worked very well, but at high speed, it was tough to gauge whether you had clicked it down twice going into Turn 1, for example.
“Leave it it automatic once,” said Spenard. OK.
What happened next was amazing. I can understand how engineers can coax a computer-controlled transmission to upshift on cues given by a driver who drives hard, but I was unprepared for the reverse. I flew into Turn 1, staying wide to set up my apex, then I hammered the brakes hard and veered into the 180-degree right. When I touched the gas, the Carrera had selected second gear — precisely and seamlessly — and that was perfect. Now, how does that computer know, from me driving fast and standing on the brakes, exactly how far to downshift? More to the point, how does it know the right gear and find it better than I could myself?
Next up was the silver Boxster, so we went from the most expensive to the least expensive. The Boxster has its rear engine moved just ahead of the rear axle, instead of just behind it, as it is in the 911. That technically makes it a mid-engined car instead of a rear-engined car, and changes the handling geometry and characteristics significantly. The Boxster was very forgiving when you put in too much oversteer, or steered into a turn too late. Very impressive, also.
Third was the yellow Boxster S, the same car with better suspension and more power. It was a different world. The S model has enough extra punch to allow you to hurl it into turns and actually play with the throttle to break the rear loose just a tad to snap you more directly through the turns. The S is really fun, and definitely moves a category up from the regular Boxster, which was fun more in a Miata sort of a way.
Spenard was enjoying himself, and paid me a big compliment after I had turned some pretty good laps, hitting the cutoff points and sweeping through the turns neatly. “It’s a pleasure to ride with someone who knows something about driving,” he said, in his French-Canadian accent. “The group we had yesterdayÂ…I wondered how some of them got to the track.”
Now it was time to drive the dark green Carrera Cabrio, top down to better expose the tan leather interior. This was not a turbo, nor did it have all-wheel drive. At first, I felt distinctly uncomfortable. The front end was so light, and the steering so twitchy because of it, that I didn’t feel comfortable going too hard into the turns. It felt as though the rear might come around with little provocation. So I took it easy on the first two laps. After the third and fourth laps, however, I realized I was going more smoothly, with less thrashing, and it handled very well. It just commanded a refocus by the driver, and constant attention, unlike the Carrera 4s, which provided an overdose of handling confidence in all instances.
Last came the dark red Carrera 4 Turbo, with the 6-speed. It was awesome. Jumping swiftly at every touch of the throttle, and responding to every shift, it was a joy to hurl it around the course. Very impressive, and very satisfying. Come through a tight turn and upshift to third, and the car leaped forward eagerly, as if you had turned on an afterburner. It had so much power, that it might have been too much power. You had to be constantly aware that it could screech out from under you.
I got out of that last test run smiling, and the smile didn’t want to leave my face. It was exhilarating, and yet there were a couple of lasting impressions. First, Carlson was right. Each car did have its own personality and mannerisms. But the biggest surprise to me was that unlimited power was not necessarily the most fun.
I would have to rank the Carrera Turbo 4 with the Tiptronic as the most impressive, and possibly the most fun of the five, because it could do things automatically that you couldn’t quite master yourself, even manually. And my No. 2 pick, for sheer fun, might be the Boxster S, because you can take some serious liberties in tossing it around, no matter the severity of the corner, and it was light, quick, agile and extremely forgiving.
The only mistake Porsche made was in theory. By bringing the media to the cars, Porsche thought it could satisfy the demand to send press-fleet cars around the country to the media. That was incorrect. Everybody who was there driving left impressed, but every one of us are now more eager than ever to spend a week with one of these Porsches — ANY one of them.
About the Author
John Gilbert is a lifetime Minnesotan and career journalist, specializing in cars and sports during and since spending 30 years at the Minneapolis Tribune, now the Star Tribune. More recently, he has continued translating the high-tech world of autos and sharing his passionate insights as a freelance writer/photographer/broadcaster. A member of the prestigious North American Car and Truck of the Year jury since 1993. John can be heard Monday-Friday from 9-11am on 610 KDAL(www.kdal610.com) on the "John Gilbert Show," and writes a column in the Duluth Reader.
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