The Other Prancing Horse

Our obsession with speed goes back to the day we first tamed a horse over five and a half thousand years ago. Life has moved on and now we routinely try to tame 300

- Aninda Sardar

HORSES. THAT’S WHERE IT ALL started, didn’t it? How else can one explain man’s obsession with speed? Watching the majestic Rajwansh rear up on cue, posing with as much professionalism as our lady friend Chahat for our ace lensman Gaurav is mesmerising. His grace and his strength is captivating. And that’s when it hit me like a brick. The bright red and brand new Porsche 718 Boxster is there because someone somewhere decided sometime around 3500 BC that horses would be good to ride. It must have been an astonishing feat for a human being, possibly the weakest animal in the world, to tame and then actually get astride an animal many times more powerful than himself. I wonder what he would have made of taming three hundred of ’em all alone and at one go.

Absurd as it may have sounded to him, truth is the driver of the Boxster does have 300 horses at his disposal. Three hundred horses (296bhp to be precise) released by a two-litre turbocharged flat-four petrol engine sitting between the front and the rear axles. Yet, neither is the Boxster the most powerful among Porsches, nor is it the most coveted. That glory belongs to the icon that made Porsche, the 911. In fact, this 718 isn’t even the most powerful Boxster there is. Thanks to our homologation norms we don’t get the more powerful 2.5-litre engined Boxster S. This Boxster though is one of the most attainable Porsches and also probably the friendliest of the lot from Stuttgart. You buy it because you want to use it and enjoy it.