First Drive: 2007 Porsche 911 Targa 4S

Of cheese, Gertrude Stein, and the trademark sensations of Porsches.

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Of cheese, Gertrude Stein, and the trademark sensations of Porsches.I had this $108,520 Porsche in full second-gear shriek, sending shock waffles down the barrier wall lining the entrance to an interstate, the wail scaring pigeons off overhead wires and waking up dogs, when it came to me: “Wow, you know what? Chinese don’t eat cheese!”

That happens any time I get into an eye-crossingly expensive and powerful sports car. Crazy revelations that have nothing to do with driving begin popping into my cerebrum, like playing head Pong. My head is warming up to the hunt for pithy witticisms to describe this stupendous sports car, but the wires are crossed, and what’s coming up is word salad.

Okay, calm down. Start at the beginning. The full name of this car is the Porsche 911 Targa 4S. Each morsel of word, each number in that grandiloquent name, adds significant numbers to the sticker price.

The journey to a Targa 4S begins with a rear-drive, 325-hp flat-six Porsche 911 Carrera ($73,260). Tack on a “4,” for four-wheel drive ($79,060), and then you’ll want the more powerful 355-hp engine that puts the S in 4S ($89,260), and now you’ve just overshot the sanity turnoff, so why not go all the way and get the two-sectioned, sliding-glass Targa roof ($96,760) that turns it into a hatchback? Or forget the whole thing and just buy that recently foreclosed house on the corner, outright.

Meanwhile, back on the interstate, somehow I’m almost at 90—how did that happen?—and begin nose giggling because there’s still a ton of juice under my right foot; even in the manual’s sixth gear, it will surge forward with the slightest pressure on the pedal, at which point it occurs to me that it was the intention of Alfred Hitchcock, the director of North by Northwest, to call that movie The Man in Lincoln’s Nose.

As usual, Porsche sent over this Targa 4S equipped with everything but the kitchen sink, pushing the price heavenward. The full-leather option means the layer of beef critter is extended over not just the seats but also the door panels and the dashboard and the armrests, and you go down for another $3365. The regular nine-speaker Bose music box has four more and costs $1390, the navigation system is $2070, the power-seat deal is $1550. And so it goes, right up to $108,520. No wonder I can’t think straight.

But what a car it is. The horizontally opposed 3.8-liter 355-horse “boxer” nosebleeder with double overhead cams and four valves per cylinder and variable valve timing is an engine that fully confirms the notion that German engineering is next to cleanliness and will get the car to 112 mph from a standstill in the time it took to count out Mike Tyson the last time he demonstrated why he most likely will no longer be able to afford one. Both events took 10 seconds (well, 10.2 in a Targa 4S that we tested in the May 2006 issue). Did you know that in his heyday Tyson spent something like $250,000 a year on pet food?

PASM, Acceleration, and Glass Roof

Power is delivered in this world, grasshopper, in different ways. Get careless in a Corvette Z06, where the power can be explosive, and you may experience a very bad moment involving the purest sort of fear when it appears you’re about to fly. Once a car that could turn squirrelly without much prompting, Porsche’s 911 delivers power today in a refined and fluid manner, like in the knockdown stream from a firehose, with the chassis all buttoned-down and behaving itself under duress, thanks to its “active suspension management” system and stability control. This technology during raucous driving makes the driver feel as if he were fully in command and doing a fine job, too. Just one noteworthy example of this refinement is that those clever Germans will let no more than 40 percent of the engine’s horsepressure out of the bag at the front wheels, so the 4S feels very much like a rear-drive car, and you don’t get a sudden dungload of oversteer, if you’re not veering crazily. This is probably not the time, but I heard on the radio that someone proposed a biography of Gertrude Stein to be titled “Alice, Get Your Gun.”

The Porsche is not as uproariously quick as that scandalous Z06, which lunges forward to 60 mph in 3.6 seconds—the 911 4S coupe we tested did it in 4.3 seconds—but Porsche gets there with a signature style and trademark driving sensations like no other, sort of the effect Cary Grant would make walking into the Dew Drop Inn in your town. Oooooh.

It’s all about sensations. It’s not a stretch to say the gears shifting in the palm of your hand feel somewhat like the bolt action of a very good rifle: schlick! schlunk! schlick! When you crank up that great engine’s howl, pedestrians don’t turn to see the Porsche itself—even Ruth Bader Ginsburg knows what a 911 looks like—but to see who’s inside it.

Make a note: The smallish fish in Hawaiian waters is the humuhumunukunukuapuaa.

Our calculations put the cost of the sliding roof—the Targa—at $7500. The two pieces of glass stretch five feet four inches front to back and in width are 37 inches. When the top is open, the hole above your head works out to 33 inches across and two feet deep. We measured it. There is also a power-operated shade between you and the glass; Porsche says the glass is made to shut out most ultraviolet sunlight. The Targa top, which is framed stylishly by two swaths of polished aluminum running down both sides of the roof, also results in a hatchback, the only one you’ll find in the 911 lineup, and it frees up eight cubic feet of usable space behind the front seats. (As in all 911s, the back seats here are more an idea than a reality.)

But unless you just got a seven-digit bonus for putting your John Hancock on a sheet of legal paper with the initials “NFL” at the top, it’s boggling to imagine owning this four-wheeled wonder. What, you put down 20 grand, and for three years you try to come up with $2500 a month? Who wants to even think about the price of insurance?

Which reminds me: In the Korean War, our less sophisticated F-86 fighters had a kill rate of 10 to 1 over the superior Soviet MiG-15s. We lost just 78 of ours; they lost 700-plus of theirs. Maybe our guys were just better pilots, or maybe it says something about the benefits of cheese.

source: caranddriver.com

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