OPTIMUM PORSCHE

If you're looking for the sweet spot among the bewildering variety of Carrera sports cars, you might well find it near the bottom of the range. We're talking about the perfectly balanced 911T.

- JON WALL

Can you believe it’s now 60 years since the Porsche 911 made its debut? That’s not much less than a human lifetime, yet still the company’s halo car remains as desired and revered as it ever was. No, make that even more so.

Of course, the latest generation, though somewhat resembling the original in both layout and styling, is a substantially different beast from its forebear, vastly more sophisticated, hugely more powerful, longer and a good deal heavier. Back in 1963, when Porsche pulled the covers off its first six-cylinder car (though full production didn’t begin till the following year), the neunelfer’s rear-mounted, naturally aspirated air-cooled two-litre engine produced just 130bhp, which is slightly south of the output of a current hybrid Corolla. Today’s 911 Carrera, often referred to by its factory designation 992, has a turbocharged water-cooled motor whose displacement, depending on the model, ranges between three and four litres and which in its maximum state of tune can thump out a massive 650 horses.

It’s what they call progress, but Porsche has never pursued horsepower as an end in itself and, keenly aware of its own heritage, the company also keeps an eye on the past—indeed, the staggering number of iterations of the 911 that have rolled out of the factory since the early ’60s means there’s an awful lot of heritage to mine. Thus the latest Carrera to land on these shores, dubbed the 911T, traces its lineage to the stripped-down and de-tuned Touring model of the late ’60s, which for five years served as the entry point to the line-up.