Porsche 911 Carrera: At the ICAR Circuit
When I was asked to choose a performance car to drive The Car Guide’s promotional contest winners around the track, the answer was easy. For me, choosing the Porsche 911 Carrera was practically a no-brainer. With its timeless, classic lines and precision mechanics, the 911 Carrera can keep pace on the circuit or offer a serene and pleasant ride for day-to-day driving. If you’re a performance junky and could have just one car to meet all your needs, the 911 is THE benchmark. Thus, it was at the wheel of this car that I headed to the ICAR Circuit to meet up with my colleagues Denis Duquet and Marc Lachapelle, who had chosen a Cadillac CTS-V and a Chevrolet Corvette Grand Sport respectively for this same event.
Laid out on the tarmac of the Mirabel Airport, the ICAR road circuit does not feature any changes in elevation, but its sequences of turns make it a very technical course. Since it’s built at an airport, there are very few physical structures to help you judge distances, which sometimes makes the driver’s job more difficult when approaching corners. However, with concrete run-off areas, drivers who misjudge their speed entering turns have the chance to slow down before coming up against a guardrail or cement barrier. Basically, ICAR is a well laid out playground perfect for exploring a car’s limits.
Improving on perfection
On this cloudy autumn day, two laps were all it took to raise the temperature of the tires and the 911 Carrera was ready for the test of ICAR. With this new generation, Porsche’s engineers opted for a steady evolution route – as opposed to a revolution – which means that every “new” 911 is superior to the “old” one,thanks to incremental improvements to the various components. Thus, the 911 Carrera’s seventh generation chassis (code 991) is lighter because of more extensive use of aluminum parts, but it’s also more rigid. The engine delivers 350 horsepower, despite the fact that its capacity has been reduced, and the manual gearbox includes seven speeds instead of six.
These changes reflect the brand’s philosophy of steadfastly and progressively improving all the elements of the car, the result being that every new generation of the 911 Carrera raises the performance bar up a notch. What’s more, I’m always impressed to see how well the brand’s engineers manage to offer inspired dynamics and relatively docile handling despite the fact that the engine is located behind the rear wheel axle, which represents a real throwback these days. These days, if you asked a group of engineers to design a high-performance sports car, they would never put everything in the back, but that’s the 911’s genetic legacy. Today’s engineers would tend to opt for a central engine to optimize weight distribution.
BMW and Mercedes-Benz: Ho-hum
Then again, it’s tough to take issue with the current 911’s dynamics. Advances in electronics have made it so that the most recent Porsche’s handling is ridiculously obedient and the “guardian angels” intervene only to correct miscalculations in the trajectory. As always, braking performance and shifting in turns are the most impressive features, although the accelerator response remains lively, even in the case of the Carrera that has 50 horses less than the 400-hp S version. It takes eight laps at a fast pace for the Brembo brakes to start to lose their efficiency, which is completely normal in these specific conditions. Moreover, note that Porsches can take more punishment on the track than their German rivals from BMW or Mercedes-Benz.
The other can’t-miss feature of the 911 Carrera is that it has a very rigid and communicative chassis along with steering that is both fine-tuned and precise to position the car on the ideal trajectory on corners. To compensate for front or tail-end drift as you come out of a curve, just press on the accelerator to re-balance the weight and obtain the desired performance – the 911 follows orders to the letter. After this ride on the ICAR Circuit, the 911 Carrera went back to the regular roads none the worse for wear. And that’s exactly what sets Stuttgart’s authentic sports car apart from the rest.