HALFWAY HOUSE

Roof up or down?’ I ask photographer Jordan Butters before we take a trip down memory lane in the 986-generation Boxster. It’s a dry if wintry two-degree morning and the correct answer is most definitely ‘up’. ‘Down,’ comes Jordan’s inevitable reply.

The Boxster’s fabric roof is easy enough to raise and lower – you just manually unclip a latch above the rear-view mirror, then press a button and it disappears beneath the rear bodywork. I timed this electric portion of the operation on my phone at a little over ten seconds. It’s easy (even if you can’t lower it on the go like you can with the secondgeneration 987).

But I’m fresh off a Zoom call with Horst Marchant, the R&D boss who oversaw the project (page 28), and one of his teething-trouble anecdotes nags at me, something about the roof