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Four Decades of the Air-Cooled Icon: My Five Most Memorable Porsche 911 Drives I remember the first time I drove a Porsche 911 like it was yesterday, even though it was over forty years ago. Back in the early days, the 911 Carrera was the icon, but I remember comparing it to the 944 Turbo from the same era in Australia. The 944 was faster, no doubt, and more usable on the road. Yet, when it came down to it, I found myself drawn to the 911. There was just something about that car that got under my skin. After two days and 600 miles, I wrote in MotorTrend that the 944 Turbo was the better car, but if I had to choose, I’d take the 911 home. That’s where the love affair with the 911 began for me. It’s not a car for everyone, but for those who understand it, it becomes a part of them. Since then, I’ve driven countless iterations of the 911, and one thing has always struck me: Porsche has done an incredible job of keeping the 911 relevant, exciting, and engaging. Even after all these years, it’s still one of the few new cars I’d spend my own money on. Looking back over the past four decades, there are five 911 models that stand out in my memory, and here they are. The 1975 Porsche 930: The Original Widowmaker Back when I first drove the 911 Carrera, veterans of the road test game spoke of the original Porsche 911 Turbo, the 930, in hushed tones. It was said to be a car that demanded total respect, with a binary boost system that made the already tricky balancing act of corner-entry understeer and corner-exit oversteer a terrifying prospect for less experienced drivers. They called it a widowmaker. It took me 35 years to get behind the wheel of one and see if the legends were true. The car I drove was one of the first 30 production Turbos ever built, now part of the legendary Porsche classic fleet. Knowing its fearsome reputation, I took it very slowly at first, feeling out the throttle and watching the tachometer, trying to get a sense of the power and torque curves. The 3.0-liter flat-six was surprisingly tractable at lower revs, happily pulling along at 2,000 rpm in top gear at 45 mph. But as the engine reached 3,500 rpm, there was a noticeable surge of power as the turbocharger kicked in, pushing 0.8 bar of boost into the intake. The sledgehammer blow I expected wasn’t there. I learned the trick to driving the original 911 Turbo smoothly and quickly was to keep the engine spinning at 4,000 rpm or higher to keep the turbocharger spooled up. Yes, there was turbo lag—very noticeable by modern standards—but it was manageable. Even today, more than 50 years after its introduction, the 911 Turbo is an incredibly fast car. First gear reaches 50 mph, second 90 mph, and third nearly 130 mph, meaning you can destroy most winding roads using only second and third gears. And while it may only have 256 hp, it weighs just 2,513 pounds, allowing it to get into and out of corners with ease. Half a century ago, its performance was otherworldly. The 1996 Porsche 911 (993): The Last of the Air-Cooled Breed For Porsche purists, this is the final version of the original 911, the last of the true air-cooled cars. It’s the Porsche you drive with your knuckles brushing against the dashboard and the metallic clatter of an air-cooled flat-six behind you. But back in 1994, when I first drove it, the 993 was the 911 of the future, the first of the line to really challenge Isaac Newton’s laws of physics. Sure, the 993 still had the slightly nose-light feel that required careful loading on corner entry to hit your apex, and the rear end could still be a handful in rough turns, but there was much more synergy between the front and rear. The 993 still felt like a 911, but within a much more manageable envelope. The key to this improved behavior was a new rear suspension that replaced the old semi-trailing arms with a new multilink setup. This allowed for very slight initial toe-out on corner entry and progressive toe-in as lateral loads increased, all while reducing the camber change that had been a weak point of 911s since 1963. This was combined with a new six-speed manual transmission that made the most of the 3.6-liter flat-six. The 964 model that it replaced was already a good car, but the 993 was a revelation. The exterior redesign, overseen by design chief Harm Lagaay, corrected the visual issues of the 964, which Lagaay felt was too tall at the front and too pulled down at the rear. The interior was also cleaner, with fewer buttons scattered in random locations. The 993 was a faster, more forgiving, and more desirable 911. It was the last of its kind, and it’s a special car. The 1996 Porsche 911 (996): The Car That Saved Porsche At the time, it was heresy. Porsche’s decision to put a water-cooled flat-six in the tail of the 996-series 911 was, to the aficionados, the automotive equivalent of Bob Dylan ditching his six-string acoustic for a Fender Strat at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. But the 996, the first clean-sheet redesign of Porsche’s indefatigable sports car in 34 years, was a hero car to me. It was the 911 that saved Porsche. Engineered under the direction of Porsche R&D chief Horst Marchart, the 996 was a clever 911, not least because it shared 38% of its parts with an all-new, less expensive mid-engine roadster the world would come to know as the Boxster. Iconoclastic Porsche boss Wendelin Weideking knew the Boxster was needed to give dealers something else to sell when the aging 928 and 968 models went out of production. Design boss Lagaay famously said with a smile after the unveiling, “We did two cars for the price of one-and-a-half.” But while media attention focused on its relationship with the Boxster and the water-cooled engine, the 996’s real story ran much deeper. In 1994, it took 130 hours to build a 993-series 911; the 996 took just 60 hours to build. The modern 911 had arrived: roomier, with the features expected of a late 20th-century sports car, but still recognizably a Porsche. Most importantly, it still drove like a 911. Only better. Yes, there was a new layer of sophistication, but the 996 retained the delicious tactility and urgent response that made the 911 a sports car like no other. And along with that original Boxster, it saved Porsche from extinction. The 2017 Porsche 911 Carrera (991.2): The Base Model That Stole My Heart Of all the 911s I’ve driven, it was a base 991.2 Carrera that truly stole my heart. It stole everyone else’s too, judging from the feedback I got at the time from colleagues who drove it. Most press fleets tend to be stacked with high-spec vehicles loaded with options, presumably because automotive PRs think we’re impressed by such things. So Porsche Cars North America’s decision to include a base 911 Carrera among the roster of then-new 991.2 models available for our 2017 MotorTrend Car of the Year testing seemed a brave one. In truth, though, it was an inspired move. The 991.2 introduced a new 3.4-liter turbocharged engine, available with 370 hp in the base Carrera or 420 hp in the Carrera S. Even in 370-hp trim, it delivered a broad band of torque and impressive efficiency. This Carrera also showed that even on the base wheel/tire combo the chassis was staggeringly communicative and adjustable. Visually, the 991.2 was a mild refresh of the bigger, skillfully reproportioned 991.1, a superbly executed interpretation of classic 911 themes, modern and beautiful. Inside was a new infotainment interface that looked great and worked well. Porsche’s PDK dual-clutch automatic remains a benchmark transmission in terms of its smooth, precise shifts. But the seven-speed stick shift on the no-frills Carrera delighted with an oily rifle-bolt action that made us all fall in love with driving again. MotorTrend’s testing director at the time, Kim Reynolds, spoke for