Porsche 911 Turbo review

It’s important to remember where the 911 Turbo sits in the Porsche range. This is absolutely not meant to be the ultimate expression of Porsche performance. Those are the GT cars built by the motorsport division – the delectable GT3 and bonkers GT3 RS (and not forgetting the 911 S/T). The Turbo S is designed to be the ultimate road-devouring exec express. Comfort and ease of use are on a par with performance and handling here.

OKAY, SO HOW DOES IT DO?

Judged on that basis, this new 992 appears to have hit the very centre of the bullseye. Getting going – setting the seat and wheel, pairing your phone etc – is fuss free. Much easier and simpler. Which is how the whole car feels as you pull away. Solid, sorted, unflappable. There’s none of the usual 911 busy-ness to the controls, the suspension is quiet and there’s a general sense of calm in the cabin.

With the electronically assisted steering damping out most of the road imperfections and the engine muted out back, it is deceptively, wickedly fast. Just easing onto a motorway, you can look around to change lanes and look down at the speedo to see you’ve effortlessly crested, well… never mind. Where you’d normally get a decent sense of speed thanks to the engine and road noise, in the new Turbo, you just don’t.

This makes it an exceptionally easy and comfortable GT car in which to unfurl hundreds and hundreds of miles – we did 700 in a day without any complaints. 

BUT CAN IT STILL BE A PROPER SUPERCAR TOO?

The short answer? Yes. The other side of the Turbo’s character is equally impressive in an entirely different way. You have to dial in Sport or preferably Sport Plus mode to really wake it up. But when you do, every sinew in the car tightens up nicely.

It feels like the wheelbase shrinks a couple of inches, 250kg gets jettisoned and the turbos go from meek to wild. But in reality the splitter and wing extend and the gearbox hangs onto ratios longer. Either way, the effect is electrifying, the car drawing from apparently bottomless wells of grip and power. This isn’t just a bit faster over the road than the outgoing model, it’s way faster than the raw numbers would suggest – and far more composed, too.

TOO COMPOSED? 

Well, Porsche has had the good sense to dial in more fun than before, too. It’s as if the Turbo engineers have been copying the GT3 team’s homework. Sure, there’s so much grip from the AWD, even the Turbo S’s prodigious pace won’t ever catch you unawares. But if you start deliberately ramping everything up and loosening the ESP (on circuit, of course), this thing will deliver all the thrills and spills we’ve frequently craved, but not always discovered, in a Turbo chassis. It even sounds quite good – not always a given in heavily turbocharged performance cars with so much ease-of-use built into them.