TORNADO INBOUND!

992 PORSCHE 911 TURBO S packs a cyclonic 478kW

- SCOTT NEWMAN

THE NEW PORSCHE 911 Turbo S is everything you’d expect: quicker, more capable, more powerful, more expensive and packed with more technology. What you might not expect is the injection of attitude. In times past, before it became the benchmark all-weather supercar, the 911 Turbo was spoken of in reverential tones. With its huge power, savage delivery and unusual weight distribution, extracting the best from the original 930 Turbo took considerable skill. Not everyone was up to the task.

Porsche isn’t intending to hark back to those days with the latest 992-generation model, but it does want to bring back a bit of mongrel to its flagship non-GT 911. “There wasn’t any real need for significant last-minute adjustments,” Porsche’s sports car boss Frank-Steffen Walliser told MOTOR’s European correspondent, Georg Kacher, during the latter’s prototype ridealong. “But I still feel we have steered the 992 Turbo fractionally more in a back-to-the-roots direction. To do so, even little things helped: stiffer joints, harder rubber bushings, tighter attachment points, modified spring and damper calibrations.”

Porsche’s official press release backs this up, stating, “New optional equipment has been introduced to underline the much sportier image of the all-wheel drive 911 Turbo S. These include the Porsche Active Suspension Management (PASM) sports chassis that has been lowered by 10mm and the sports exhaust system with adjustable flaps that guarantees a distinctive sound.” Not that the Turbo has abandoned everyday usability: “What we definitely refrained from is turning a nicely balanced GT into a hard-edged street fighter,” said Walliser.