VIVIAN CAMPBELL
Porsche ownership is a wonderful thing. If there's a word of caution to be exercised when encouraging friends to join the party, however, it is the fact all other cars can seem inferior after seat time in a Stuttgart-crested speed machine. The design, engineering, quality of construction and high-grade materials used during development and assembly of the sports cars we love is second to none, and this is before mentioning the sublime chassis dynamics and stupendous performance on offer. Put simply, there is a strong chance of ‘no going back’ after securing personal possession of a Porsche.
There is another risk it's worth impressing upon the uninitiated: you'll want more than one Porsche. The firm's standing in not only the sphere of sports car production, but the automotive world in general, sometimes clouds the fact Porsche assembles a small number of vehicles relative to the size of its reach and reputation. Indeed, take a moment to look back at Porsche's seventy-five years of manufacturing and you'll notice just how few models have been in existence during this time. Even today, just six different products are offered to showroom visitors: the Boxster, Cayman, Macan, Cayenne, Taycan and, of course, the evergreen 911.
The reason so many enthusiasts — myself included — own more than one Porsche? Because quite unlike many other manufacturers, who trade on past glory by using badge engineering to elevate the status of models bearing little resemblance to their far more impressive namesake (Ford Mustang Mach-E SUV anyone?), Porsche's sports cars are genuine evolutions of what came before. This issue's cover story (uniting a Carrera RS 2.7 with a 997 GT3 RS) proves as much.
The 911 is obviously the best example of a Porsche product with clear, traceable lineage through multiple generations (now spanning sixty years), but you can see the same in the brand's transaxle line, from the first-generation 924 through to the 968. There's also a self-contained quarter-century of 928 development to explore. Even the Boxster can claim to be a progression of what came before — though billed as an all-new Porsche product at the time of launch in the mid-1990s, the 986 was incontestably an advancement of the 914, introduced as a replacement for the 912 in 1969.
Quite why Porsche took twenty-five years to realise reintroducing
