BUYING: TRIED AND TESTED YOUR NEXT PORSCHE
Can it really be two decades since Porsche launched its not-so-difficult watercooled-911 second album? Well, yes, it can. I know because I’m in possession of a little enamel badge depicting a yellow 997 Carrera and the inscription Hamelin, Juni 2004. Hamelin is a region of Lower Saxony famous for the legend of The Pied Piper of Hamelin. It’s not a place I will forget in a hurry — it was the location for my first-ever Porsche product launch.
Despite being the owner of a Carrera 3.2 in 2004, I am very much a child of the water-cooled era of Porsche production. The Boxster was a pivotal moment in my Porsche journey. The penny didn’t so much drop as cascade, one-armed bandit style, after a week in charge of a 996 Carrera. Sure, I had a foot in the beardy air-cooled camp, but it would have been utterly perverse of me to claim the new generation of Porsches were anything other than game-changing. Not even the venerated 993, last of the air-cooled 911s, could see which way a 996 went if the newer model was deployed with any kind of driving vigour. The 997 carried on the good work.
Twenty years, then, is a good time to look back, is it not? Indeed, this is something of a 997-themed period for , what with an enjoyable (for me, at least) showdown between a 997 Carrera GTS and a 997 Turbo gracing last month’s cover. From the Editor’s chair? I suspect too enjoyable — the missive from Editor Furr is to get behind the wheel of a ‘basic instinct’ 997 CarreraProbably. It’s why my own 996 was an entry-level Carrera.
