Is the Porsche 911 Turbo the penultimate driving machine?

“It’s all-wheel drive. It’ll get out of there, no problem,” says Alastair Brook while casually adjusting the settings on his Canon.

Half a million dollars of Porsche 992 Turbo is sitting on the beach at Waratah Bay, staring Canute-like at the incoming tide. Behind us is the steep boat ramp, ahead of us the Southern Ocean, which doesn’t seem in much of a mood to negotiate. To the east, across kilometres of deserted sand are the peaks of Wilsons Promontory, disappearing cryptically into cloudy tops. That’s where we hope to be heading after this anxiety-inducing spot of light off-roading.

Like most of Victoria’s more scenic spots, the Prom isn’t really a place to take a performance car. It’s usually choked in tourist traffic, with the biggest hazard being the very real danger of being rear-ended by a Tarago driver goggling at an emu. Today is different. Melbourne is locked down in a snap Covid circuit-breaker, so we have the whole park to ourselves. The ribbon of tarmac that meanders down to the southernmost piece of tarmac on the Australian mainland is hosting a car with a big reputation and some equally hefty questions to answer.

You see, I’ve always had a bit of an issue with the Porsche 911 Turbo, and I’m not alone on that score. Given my druthers, I’d always plump for a base Carrera or a racy GT3 over a Turbo due to the fact that in trying to do everything, the Turbo – to me at least – appeared to lose that last couple of per cent of focus. And it’s exactly this couple of per cent that differentiates the 911 from, you know, cars. With this in mind, and having given the Turbo one heck of a scruffing up on the Eildon-Jamieson road on our video shoot, this is an opportunity to put the car’s touring chops to the test, to see if there is a personality type other than the flat-track bully behind the 911 Turbo.

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We start in Waratah Bay. Problem is, you can’t see the sea from Waratah Bay, the community hunkering from icy southerlies behind a tree-choked bund beyond which is one of the most beautiful beaches in Australia.

Which is the reason why, front lifter kit engaged, the Porsche edges down the boat ramp onto what looks like fairly firm sand for its beauty shot. It’s only when I get out of the car that I realise the sand’s about as firm as a Tony Abbott shirtfronting.

What follows is about 15 minutes of forced insouciance while Brook explores some angles, wondering whether our support vehicle, a mighty 1.6-litre SsangYong Korando would be able to pull 1640kg of 911 Turbo up a sharp incline without blowing its gearbox into shrapnel. As it turns out, getting the Porsche back onto the bitumen is simplicity itself. Just engage reverse and watch it roll serenely up the ramp and onto the warm bosom of the blacktop.

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"It feels dramatic from the inside and a little unruly, but never concerning. It’s all but invisible from the exterior."

The route from Waratah Bay wends north-east around the silt-choked upper reaches of Shallow Inlet crossing the grazing lands of the upper Yanakie Isthmus. The 911 lazes at part throttle, tacking across the apexes of roads cambered for Gippsland rain.

Guide the nose gently on the gnarled macadam and feel the resistance build in the electrically assisted steering, the tension dissipating fractionally as the camber helps and then ramps up again as you lose the crown of the road. Nudge onto the mud line from a thousand tractors that has turned to withered dust out of the wheel tracks and the car again senses infinitesimal degrees of slip mid-corner and the steering tenses slightly like a flexed biceps, mirroring your own input as if in cybernetic sympathy.

If you’ve never driven a 911 and have wondered why they are so deified, it’s in the fanatic details such as these that are so lovingly finessed.

The billiard-table flat Yanakie Isthmus connects the Promontory to the mainland. At one time this isthmus was a saddle in a system of mountain ranges that marched across what is now Bass Strait, linking Tasmania with the mainland. As the land was submerged, only the tops of the mountain were left jutting from the Southern Ocean, now the Bass Strait islands. The Prom itself was part of the ancient Bunurong Range which connected the continent and Tasmania. The isthmus was inundated, and the Prom was, for some time, an island. Over time, sand deposition clogged this shallow strait and reconnected the island to its motherland.

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There’s nobody at the gatehouse into the national park. There’s nobody on the road either and there hasn’t been for the last half hour. The only sign of life is a Japanese hog deer peering from the undergrowth, perhaps aware that the risk of a hunter’s bullet is reduced if it stays within proximity of the gatehouse. It’s looking at a very different kind of bullet today.

With 427kW at its elbow, the 911 Turbo might not quite have the Herculean musculature of the 478kW Turbo S that finished runner-up at this year’s Performance Car of the Year, but it would require a ridiculously fine-tuned internal g-meter to register any difference in their acceleration, the Turbo registering 2.8 seconds to 100km/h and the Turbo S shaving a tenth off that figure. In other words, here you are in the penultimate model in the line up and you have more than 260kW per tonne at your elbow.

With the current crop of mid-engined junior supercars requiring around 300kW/tonne to distinguish themselves, the Turbo finds itself in a slightly odd spot in the market, as expensive as many of these low-slung exotics but occupying a subtly different niche. You’d purchase the Turbo if you were less concerned with being looked at and merely wanted something with barn-door engineering that could handle just about any assignment asked of it, which may or may not include lumbering onto beaches.

Beneath the sheetmetal, the old Mezger-derived flat-six is but a distant memory. This aluminium-block 3745cc dry-sumped unit, which Porsche rather optimistically refers to as a 3.8, instead shares a bloodline with the more prosaic MA2 3.0-litre turbocharged engine plumbed into the posteriors of the Carrera and Carrera S models.

That additional swept capacity is accounted for by an increase in bore size from 91mm to 102mm and Porsche has also worked hard at air management, improving the flow of cooler, denser air to the two variable geometry turbochargers.

Unlike the typical individual side-mounted intercoolers that used to be found behind the door ducts of previous water-cooled Turbos, the 992 has repositioned the intercooler system to the top of the engine compartment with fresh ambient air now breathed through ducts sitting beneath the rear decklid. Larger charge air-coolers now reside at the back of the engine, with the air filters sitting tucked into the guards. Where the 991 Turbo got by with a pair of air intakes, the 992 doubles that.

The turbochargers themselves are mounted symmetrically and unlike the twin units of the 991, feature contra-rotating turbine and compressor wheels. There are also wastegate flaps operated by electric stepper motors that can fully open the wastegates after a cold start, lighting off the catalytic converters in the process. Clever stuff.

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It’s hard to fault many aspects of this car’s go, stop and steer. Even before you’ve gone for the bigger carbon ceramic brake option, the Turbo is ludicrously overspecified in the stoppers department. At 380mm, its rear discs are as big as the front discs on the significantly heavier BMW M3 Competition. The only reason you’d choose the ceramics is because it’d save you cleaning brake dust off your wheels. Or, perhaps, simply because you can. I suspect that’s a justification that comes up frequently in the 911 Turbo buying decision and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Nothing wrong with the control weights in this 911 either. The pedal efforts and the gearing of the rack seem perfectly in tune, aided by a near-perfect driving position, pedal spacing and wheel ergonomics. It’s not all gravy though. There are a number of ergonomic glitches that afflict the 992. The classic five-dial dash is a classy hat-tip to Porsche’s heritage, but the outer two dials are both obscured by the steering wheel.

Then there are the door handles. The inner door releases can easily and painfully pinch the pad of your index finger if they’re not used in exactly the right way. I then managed to fracture a finger while enthusiastically buffing down the exterior of the car when one of the flush exterior door handles popped out just as I was running a microfibre over it, snagging a pinkie.

I nurse the rapidly swelling digit in the confines of the 911’s cabin while Brook begins the process of attaching a camera rig to its rear three-quarter, safe in the knowledge that this will require at least 15 minutes of head scratching, suction cupping, sighing and chin stroking. It’s a lovely place to be. The perceived materials quality has improved leaps and bounds over the prior 991 model, and this particular car is nicely finished with optional 18-way adaptive sports seats and an interior package in a very tasteful matte carbon. There are a few more squeaks and rattles than I’d expect in a car like this though, and you can move them around the cabin from right to left door card and then to somewhere behind the rear seats merely by adjusting the frequency of inputs with the throttle pedal.

The stubby metal shifter that you double-tap into gear now marshals an eight rather than seven-speed PDK transmission. All gears have new ratios: the first gear is now shorter and eighth gear longer than the previous seventh gear. The ’box also features a reinforced clutch with two additional pairs of discs for the purpose of transferring higher torque. In total that’s six pairs of discs with twelve friction surfaces and it works. Beautifully.

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The first few kilometres into the Prom arrow down in a tunnel of tea trees, banksias and sheoaks, with the occasional sand dune rising to your right. You pass the old RAAF Yanakie airfield, where 67 Squadron flew Avro Ansons during the war on maritime patrol duties, searching for Japanese submarines. No subs were ever accounted for, although it’s said that some noncombatant humpback whales were bombed in error. From there the road becomes more serpentine before dropping down to Darby River, the old entrance to the national park. Rising before you is the great granite wall of Darby Saddle, and as you ascend, it seems that the world is carpeted in trees, marching for kilometres in a huge green bowl all the way to Corner Inlet.

The roads have been patchily repaired after recent rainstorms here, and the 911 bucks and skips tetchily on the lumpy blacktop. In its most comfortable drive mode, it’s relatively supple and if you’d been a little concerned about Porsche’s claim that this generation had become a fiercer thing, rest easy. There’s still enough compliance to make it a viable daily driver. Even in Sport or Sport Plus, it never becomes particularly brittle in its primary response. You feel you’re sparring with it but it’s not hitting to hurt you.

Darby Saddle is high enough for the moisture-laden Southerlies to succumb to the effects of orographic lifting, the air masses reaching dew point as they ascend the south face, forming cloud and dumping their contents, making the south side of the range far more fecund than that of the northern rain-shadow. After the astonishing views of the Anser Islands that punctuate the ocean view from the saddle, the road starts to curl inwards on itself, the vegetation overhanging the bitumen and, in places, holding dampness long after the rest of the road has dried. Microphones in the Turbo’s wheelarches detect the hissing frequency of water on the road and tamp back the excesses of torque delivery automatically, this technique pre-empting rather than reacting to – as in the case of wheel slip – any traction loss.

Push the Turbo a little and it replicates the handling characteristics we observed with its Turbo S sibling at the last Performance Car of the Year event, sniffing out traction but deploying that power with a slight diagonal porpoising effect. It feels dramatic from the inside and a little unruly, but never concerning. It’s all but invisible from the exterior. We put the car into Sport Plus for to wick up the aero for the photographs but then mute the sports exhaust as otherwise we’d probably wake the locals of Launceston. The Turbo is loud when driven hard, a mixture of exhaust and a discordant thrashing, pulverising maceration of air.

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The road snakes rhythmically downhill, affording glimpses of Norman and Great Glennie Islands out in the blue, fragmentary remnants of the weathered and battered Bunurong Range. A koala ambles into the road, pauses to consider the Carmine Red projectile now standing on its nose, before turning its back and continuing its bow-legged pad in search of a superior gum tree. The 911 flashes past Squeaky Beach, scientifically proven to have whiter quartz sand than Hyams Beach, NSW, the beach to which Guinness awarded a world record. One more beach and the road straightens for a kilometre or so, gently descending before seeming to terminate at the base of the 558m-tall mass of our final destination, Mount Oberon.

The Turbo lopes along dismissively, folding its active aero addenda away for safe keeping. We’ve come a long way since the Porsche 959 first introduced a rudimentary active aero system some 35 years ago, lowering itself at high speed. The 992 Turbo features three key active elements. Up front are active aero flaps, which feed air to the radiators and then close at 70km/h, before reopening to balance aerodynamic demand above 130km/h. Switch into Sport, Sport+ or Wet mode, or dial out the traction control and the flaps will fully open.

There’s also a pneumatically retractable chin spoiler which, when coupled with an active rear wing, that now adjusts for both height and angle, while also including an air brake function, boosts maximum downforce by 15 percent to 170kg at 250km/h. The rear wing is a genuine piece of work, some 8 per cent bigger than the 991’s unit but 400g lighter. Its chord sits at its most innocuous angle of attack in eco mode, while the Performance II position again reduces its presentation to the airflow above 260km/h, reducing load on the rear tyres and preventing the need to increase the tyre pressures. Choose wet mode on the manettino dial and the wing fully extends but offers no additional angle, reducing aerodynamic flow separation behind the car without affecting the longitudinal centre of mass.

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Tangential mulling of boundary layers and Reynolds numbers is interrupted as the 911’s suspension thuds recalcitrantly and the massive P-Zero tyres chunter and drum constantly. This constant road noise, along with the Turbo’s relatively modest 67-litre fuel tank, ultimately limit its grand touring credentials. I check the range to empty on the car and realise that it might require a very gentle run back in order to make the BP at Foster.

A road crew is working at the turning that marks our ascent of Oberon. They eyeball the car as it accelerates gently up the incline and out of view. From here, the road narrows again, and throws a series of challenging corners hemmed in by guard rail and rock walls. Crack open the windows, loosen off the shackles of the optional $6470 sports exhaust and punch the car out of the crazily contoured corners here and it’s almost shockingly savage.

You feel as if the car is challenging your internal clock speed, trying to throw inputs at your processor faster than it can manage them. It’s a breathtakingly accomplished car and one that delivers very specific challenges to the keen driver but trying to contextualise the 911 Turbo sometimes raises more questions than answers. This 992 model is the weight of four blokes heavier than the 996 Turbo, the first of the comparatively similar, all-wheel drive, water-cooled models. It occupies a greater road footprint than a Range Rover Classic. Is this progress?

Most worryingly, it seems that the functional space for it is narrowing, squeezed on one side by the 353kW Carrera GTS and by the 992 GT3 Touring on the other. Prior to the meteoric ascendancy of Andreas Preuninger’s GT department, the Turbo’s raison d’etre was easy to identify. It was the fastest and wildest 911 you could buy. Now its positioning, and indeed its personality, is a little more opaque. That didn’t stop the 991 Turbo from winning our PCOTY award twice (in Turbo and Turbo S guises) so perhaps my personal viewpoint doesn’t always tally with those of our historic judging panel, but in this year’s competition where the 992 Turbo S finished second overall, only three cars out of the 10 gathered scored lower for X-factor. Go figure.

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Insidious power inflation also means that it’s tough to exploit a 911 Turbo on road. On this road, especially so. We’re limited to punching it out of tighter corners for a second or two. If I’m honest, you’d have more fun in a Fiesta ST, but there’s satisfaction to be gleaned from the implacable engineering integrity here. You might not need your analogue watch to be waterproof to 200m, but there’s a reassurance to the fact that it is, and can shrug off whatever you throw at it.

The 911 Turbo feels as mechanically bombproof as one could reasonably expect of a car with this level of performance and that’s key to its appeal. You may have grown out of a junior McLaren, Ferrari or Lamborghini or else their attention-deficit ownership regimens could prove too fatiguing. The 911 Turbo offers all of their face-warping pace and capability with none of the gratuitous drama. As the sun sets over Picnic Beach and there’s the prospect of a very long drive home, I can grudgingly endorse the appeal of a car that may not break your heart but will do a solid number on a pinky finger.

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The route: Waratah Bay - Mount Oberon

Timing is everything: Go during school holidays or at peak weekends and the Prom will be chockers. An early start on a weekday pays dividends. It’s also easy to underestimate the length of time it takes to exit the National Park in the evening, as it gets very dark and there are plenty of suicidal marsupials. Pro tip: the light pollution-free Vereker Lookout track is a great spot during the new moon for photographing the Milky Way.

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2021 Porsche 992 911 Turbo performance figures

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2021 Porsche 992 911 Turbo specifications

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