Porsche 911 Carrera S - Play It Again

The new 911 starts speaking to you immediately with softly spoken words, for this has never been a sports car that needs to raise its voice to be heard amongst the clatter of pop culture insecurities.

And before you know it you’ve mentally stuck out your hand and given the new Porsche member a solid friendly handshake. You just know you’ll be seeing a lot more of it from here on in – the quintessential benchmark of professionalism.

A pace around its familiar proportions is a calm study of assessment no radical rewrites in thinking here but enough twitches of a revolution that will guide the world’s de facto sports car through a foggy period of transition that, to pick just one, will see 911 Turbo become hybrid.

The 992 nomenclature starts where the 991.2 left off. All engines are turbocharged, the optional design and dynamic packages you’ve come to know and the acronyms that personalize them are present and even more time-shaving than they were before. It is no secret that this current Carrera S will transform into a variety of models that will continue to illuminate areas and abilities of the car’s entire lifecycle that aren’t quite so apparent to us now.

Even though there are always those archetypal certainties - engine shoved out to the back with the two doors leading to a 2+2 cabin and a view over the brim of the steering wheel sharpening your attention to just above the front wheels - the new 911, spoken as 992 by Porsche anoraks, is tastefully engineered to make it appear visibly fresh and simultaneously iconic.

Engineers can’t go full clean-sheet design with the 911. Within the design are rules and restrictions that focus the mind versus other brands that are ever-changing. I sometimes wonder if Ferdinand Porsche could have realistically expected that his formula for the 911 would still triumph amidst the pressures and innovations that have developed some fifty years later.