Porsche 997 Carrera S – Review and Photoshoot

By Ash Simmonds

Discussion in the Australian Porsche forums.

Thanks to Aussie Exotics member mhh for forcing me to finally face my demons and make me drive his daily-hack 911.

I’ve never been a lover of Porkers, sure they’re fast, but do they have to be so boring on a design front and sound like a hairpin caught in a dustbuster?

Well, is the 997 Carrera S worth steering…

What more can you say beyond expectations? It lives up to all of them.

So easy to drive, and so easy to drive hard. It’s difficult to remain the usual jocular critic of Porsche when you actually drive one – because they just are such perfect driver’s cars. Spend enough time in the latest platinum exotics from Modena and Sant’ Agata and most else is barely worth a mention, but somehow even amongst Ferraris and Lamborghinis the basic Porsche 911 is still a blast.

The biggest criticism should be gotten out of the way first – it has no drama.

It goes fast, it drives beatifully, it’s 5,000 km old from Stuttgart – but nobody cares! Driving around the more populous areas, people barely look at you. Occasionally someone who knows the difference between a 997 and a 996 will squint at your car, but otherwise as far as road-appeal goes, the car isn’t important.

However, this is a boon for the real driver… you could have a 10 year old $50k junker or the latest $425k 997 GT2 Turbo monster and 99.9% of the population won’t know what you’re in – you’re just another wanker in a Porsche! The greatest enjoyment is not the shallow yet oddly rewarding thumbs up you get when out in a Ferrari, or how other cars seem to become rolling metal turtles with 4 arms poking out with mobile phone cameras pointed at you when you’re in a Lamborghini.

The fun is – the drive. And occasionally you drive past a shopfront with a window reflection large enough to encase the smile that seems to have commandeered your face.

As for go – below 3k it’s not much, you can put your foot down and wait for a bus – or drop a cog or two and put the engine in the sweet spot (which is anything over 4k) and it will propel you forward quicker than you really would like to go on public roads.

Everything is a doddle in this car – everything just works. I’m used to getting into mates cars and having a 5 minute intro to the various operations of the vehicle, and I hadn’t driven a Porsche since a brief encounter with a 996 GT2 a couple years ago. But all I did here was get in and drive… the driver in me knew what to do – there’s no instruction manual for driving passion.

Cornering is superb – as you’d expect on a Porsche, however I found specifically in this case that cornering whilst on-throttle was especially easy also – something that often upsets a chassis or unsettles the drive line. I didn’t go anywhere near what would be classed as losing control, but the feedback you get gives you the confidence to plough into corner after corner without respect for silly little things like physics etc.

The most amazing thing though is the driving modes – OK, I was already expecting the drive to be great before I got in so that’s not entirely fair, the point is, the various modes available really actually made a significant difference to the feel of the car. One button push, and these seemingly smooth freeway roads of South Australia reveal themselves as the undulating beasts they really are – kind of making you sympathetic to low-end manufacturers like Holden and Mitsubishi realising what they have to deal with. Kind of.

Also, there’s a button that toughens throttle response… and it’s not just like things get quicker and easier – it’s like the actual pedal becomes harder, the travel shorter, the engine louder. It just begs you to lose your licence to drive.

There’s just a couple problems with the car… the first being drivability in traffic. It’s so easy to drive your blind but nympho grandma could drive it, however the left rear flank has a blind-spot big enough for a line-up of desperate women at the local $1 vodka bar. The other thing… it’s a nothing car! Every box on the form that you can tick about this car reads “great” – but none of the “amazing” or “crap” boxes are ticked. So not to sound like it’s a character assasination, but this car is “great”.

Too bad it’s so ugly.

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