Porsche 992 911 goes up against the best of its competitors

ON ONE level, it could be argued that the Porsche 911 is a fundamentally boring car. Boring insofar as it’s predictably excellent, metronomically competent, an OCD ticker of dynamic boxes. It barely puts a foot wrong, so when Porsche brings us an all-new 911, we just know that it’s not going to be a duffer. So instead of putting it head to head with comparable rivals, we did something a bit different. We rounded up a bunch of coupes that offer decidedly different attractions to see whether it’d be stupid to spend your hard-earned on anything other than the new 911. Fireworks ensue.

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That’s just one of the stories appearing in the August issue of Wheels, due on the shelves July 18 - which is tomorrow if you’re reading this on July 17. If you really can’t wait, then click on the image above to flick through the teaser photo gallery - though the best pics are in the mag.

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Most of us felt we’d done a pretty tidy job with that feature and would have gladly knocked off right there for the month, but editor Alex Inwood decided that you, demanding readers that you are, required more of the good stuff and put us to work producing it.

We have a story on the work that goes into building Lewis Hamilton’s all-conquering Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 car, after a visit to their Brackley nerve centre in the UK. Imagine how you’ve managed to get this far in life without knowing that Brackley has a vending machine that dispenses F1 car parts instead of Snickers bars.

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Staying with the three-pointed star, there’s also the full low-down on the berserk 310kW A45 AMG, a hot hatch that fronts up with more power than a Porsche 996 Turbo , a car that most of us called the fastest car in the real world not so long ago. I say ‘most of us’ when I should probably say ‘me’ but let’s not get too hung up on minutiae. If that all sounds a bit hectic, we sent Alex Inwood to Switzerland to drive its little bro, the A35 AMG on some of Europe’s most stunning mountain roads. He sent himself, in actual fact, but I’m deputy editor so when he’s away I get to overestimate the extent of my responsibilities.

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Should you prefer something without forced induction, that features a manual transmission and good ol’ rear-wheel-drive, how about an AU Falcon TS50? Or, if that doesn’t appeal, a Porsche Cayman GT4? The wholly lovely Cayman gets the full technical rundown in the August edition, Kyle Fortune giving us the backstory on why it got a new 4.0-litre powerplant (neither Tickford nor John Bowe weren’t consulted, sadly) and why the manual’s not dead.

Elsewhere, there’s Nathan Jacobs’ stunning photography of the Mazda RX-7 Bathurst R in ‘Modern Classic’ ; a comparison test of the finest $17k cheapies from Kia, Renault and Suzuki; our first taste of the game-changing Genesis G70; background on the what the Genesis marque means to Australians; Ford’s Ranger Raptor at maximum attack in South Africa; and I sign off with my final long term review of the McLaren 570S. All things have an end, and a sausage has two, as they say in Germany.

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So do yourself a favour, get to a newsstand and buy the latest issue of Wheels. If you can’t do that, stand in a servo and just read it while somebody cleans unidentifiable goo out of the coffee machine’s milk pipe. But you’re not that much of a mooch, are you? Better still, click on the link below and subscribe. It brings down the price of each issue to less than that of a disappointing muffin and coffee combo deal. With mystery floating bits in the coffee. So you know what to do.