BB Monday, June 22 Full | The Bold and the Beautiful 6-22-2026 Spoilers Full

The Titans of the Icon: My 5 Most Unforgettable Porsche 911 Experiences For four decades, I’ve had the privilege of getting behind the wheel of a dizzying array of Porsches. My very first 911 memory is as sharp as a freshly tuned engine: a white 3.0-liter Carrera with black Fuchs alloys. It was pure, unadulterated 911—narrow body, no rear wing, no power steering, just a five-speed manual that demanded skill. I remember it feeling fast, yes, but flawed. In fact, I’d just tested a 944 Turbo, a car that, in Australia at the time, cost roughly the same as that Carrera. The 944 had more power, more torque, and it was significantly faster on any road with less effort. Yet, against logic, I fell for the 911. I wrote back then that the 944 was the better car, no doubt. But when it came down to it, and if I had to spend my own money, I’d have the 911. The 944 Turbo could make a poor driver look good, and its performance was breathtaking. But the 911 tugged at something deeper. I concluded that the “gloriously imperfect 911 Carrera is a sports car of a different age and reflects different values. It’s not tailored to meet the needs of most drivers. It demands understanding and respect. That’s why I’d take it home.” Since then, I’ve driven dozens of 911s. With every iteration—except perhaps the 964, which felt like the 911 idea had run its course in the early 90s—I’ve marveled at how Porsche has polished this icon, keeping it relevant, exciting, and engaging. Forty years on, the 911 remains one of the few new cars I’d actually spend my own dollars on. Out of the vast field I’ve sampled, these are the five Porsches that still echo in my mind. The Original 911 Turbo: A Beast of the Past Back when I drove that 3.0-liter Carrera, the original 911 Turbo was spoken of in hushed, almost religious tones by the road-test veterans. They described it as a car that demanded the utmost respect, a machine whose sudden, binary boost delivery made walking that tightrope between corner-entry understeer and corner-exit oversteer a high-stakes challenge requiring quick hands and serious nerve. It wasn’t a car that forgave mistakes; it was unforgiving. They called it a widowmaker. It took me 35 years to finally experience one myself. The car I tested was one of the very first 30 production Turbos ever made, now a crown jewel in Porsche’s legendary classic fleet. Knowing its fearsome reputation, I eased into it, playing with the throttle, feeling the turbo build pressure and watching the tachometer. The engine was surprisingly tractable at low revs, happily chugging along at 2,000 rpm in top gear, keeping the 911 Turbo cruising smoothly at 45 mph. But once the needle hit 3,500 rpm, there was a definite surge as the turbocharger shoved 0.8 bar of boost into the induction. Still, the sledgehammer impact I expected never arrived. The key to making progress in that original 911 Turbo, I discovered, was to keep the 3.0-liter flat-six spinning above 4,000 rpm to keep the turbo fully spooled up. Yes, there’s turbo lag—and it’s very noticeable by today’s standards—but it’s manageable. Even now, with more than 50 years of history, this 911 is impressively fast on the road. First gear will take you to 50 mph, second to 90 mph, and third to nearly 130 mph. That means you could carve up most winding two-lane roads using just second and third gears. And while it might only produce 256 hp, it weighs just 2,513 pounds, allowing it to dance in and out of corners with agility. A half-century ago, its performance would have seemed truly otherworldly. The 993-Generation: The Last of the Line For Porsche purists, this is the end of an era. The 993 represents the final, pure breed of the 911—the one you drive with your knuckles grazing the dash, feeling the raw snarl of an air-cooled flat-six right behind your head. But back in 1994, when I first drove it, the 993 was the 911 of the future, the first in the lineup to seriously challenge the laws of physics. It still had that classic 911 front-end feel that demanded to be loaded on corner entry to find your apex, and the rear end could still dance on the rough stuff, but there was a much stronger connection between the front and rear. The 993 still did 911 things, but within a vastly improved margin for error. The revolutionary heart of the 993 was a completely new rear suspension. The old semi-trailing arms were replaced with a sophisticated multilink setup. This allowed for slight initial toe-out on corner entry and then progressive toe-in as lateral forces increased, all while dramatically reducing the camber change that had been the Achilles’ heel of the 911 since 1963. This innovation was paired with steering that was 16 percent quicker, at 2.5 turns lock-to-lock, making the front end feel incredibly decisive. And of course, there was a new six-speed manual transmission that perfectly harnessed the power of the 3.6-liter flat-six. Thanks to lighter internal components, Bosch Motronic 2.0 engine management, and a redesigned dual exhaust, the engine pulled harder to its 268 hp power peak at 6,100 rpm. Compared to the 964 model it replaced, the 993 was a revelation. It wasn’t just the engineering breakthroughs, masterminded under the leadership of Ulrich Bez (who would later head Aston Martin): The exterior redesign, executed by design chief Harm Lagaay, fixed the visual issues he saw in the 964, a car he felt was too tall at the front and too tapered at the rear. The interior was cleaner, too, with fewer buttons scattered haphazardly. The 993 was a 911 that was faster, more forgiving, and most importantly, far more desirable. It was the peak of air-cooled engineering, a masterpiece that Porsche purists still cherish today. The 996-Generation: The One That Saved Porsche At the time, it was pure sacrilege. Porsche’s decision to put a water-cooled flat-six in the tail of the 996-series 911 was, for aficionados, the automotive equivalent of Bob Dylan ditching his acoustic guitar for a Fender Strat at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. But the 996, the first clean-sheet redesign of Porsche’s unstoppable sports car in 34 years, was a hero car to me. It was the 911 that saved Porsche from the brink of extinction. Engineered and developed under the sharp eye of Porsche R&D chief Horst Marchart, the 996 was a stroke of genius, primarily because it shared 38 percent of its components with an all-new, less expensive mid-engine roadster that the world would soon know as the Boxster. Iconoclastic Porsche boss Wendelin Weideking understood that the Boxster was crucial to give the dealerships something else to sell once the aging 928 and 968 models were discontinued. As design chief Lagaay wryly remarked after the company unveiled the 996, “We did two cars for the price of one-and-a-half.” But while the media focused on its relationship with the Boxster and the switch to water-cooling, the 996’s true story ran much deeper. In 1994, it took Porsche 130 hours to build a 993-series 911; the 996 took just 60 hours. The modern 911 had arrived: roomier and equipped with all the features expected of a late-20th-century sports car, but still unmistakably Porsche’s icon. Most importantly, it still drove like a 911. Only better. Yes, there was a new veneer of sophistication, but the 996 retained that delicious tactility and urgent response that had made the 911 a sports car like no other. And along with the original Boxster, it rescued Porsche from vanishing entirely. The 991.2-Generation Carrera: The Honest 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 by the feedback I got at the time from colleagues who drove it. Most press fleets tend to be loaded with high-spec vehicles—lots of carbon fiber and fancy options, presumably because the PR teams 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