TESTED
Oversteer is back—and Porsche’s got it! Early Porsches had it too, and now it has come full circle. Barely three years ago, Porsche employed a device called a “camber compensator” to curb the oversteering tendencies of the 356 series. Then the completely redesigned suspension of the 911 and 912 models made Porsches behave like normal, front-engined cars, and the purists started to carp. Porsche had even hidden an iron weight behind the 912’s front bumper to keep the back end from coming around. Sure, understeer is safe—great for the masses—but oversteer makes driving fun . . . if you’re expert enough to handle it. Fanciers of the marque yearned for the good old days when they used to wischen their Speedsters through turns, tails all hung out, arms sawing away like mad on the steering wheel.
Porsche is making a car for these drivers again, offering a sportier version of the 6-cylinder 911 dubbed the 911S. S for Super. Super because horsepower is up 20%, from 148 to 180. Super because the brake discs are vented. And Super because the suspension has been modified with strengthened struts, Koni adjustable shocks, a stiffer front anti-sway bar, and an anti-sway bar added at the rear.
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The rear anti-sway bar, in addition to reducing body lean, has an effect diametrically opposed to that of the old “camber compensator.” Gott im Himmel! Ubersteuer! We’ll hang out our tails on the Siegfried Line. “This is no car for a novice,” warns a Porsche brochure.
The 911S’s introduction has occasioned a shuffle in Porsche’s marketing structure so that it now approximates the former ascending scale of Normal, Super and Carrera engines in the same body. The prices have been rearranged too. On the bottom rung is the 102-hp, 4-cylinder 912, with a base price of $4790, up $100 from last year, but two instrument panel gauges have been added. The 148-hp, 6-cylinder 911 is now $5990, down $500 from last year. However, many items that were standard on the 911 in ’66 are optional in ’67. In effect, it becomes simply a higher-powered version of the 912. The flagship of the fleet, the $6990, 180-hp, 6-cylinder 911S, is loaded with performance, luxury, and distinctive features like racy-looking forged magnesium-alloy wheels, a leather-covered steering wheel rim, extra instrumentation, an auxiliary gasoline heater, fog lights, pile carpets, and waffled padding on the dash. Most of these unique options are available—for a price—on the 911 and 912 (the mag wheels for $175), along with the old standbys like chromed steel road wheels.
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In our zeal to obtain a 911S for a road test, we had to settle for one right off the boat. The car hadn’t been dealer-prepared, much less fine-tuned, and it wasn’t exactly in full song. Acceleration times were little better than those of a Weber-carbureted 911 5-speed we drove recently, which clocked 0-60 mph in 6.9 seconds and the standing quarter-mile in 15.6 seconds at 90 mph. Actually, our times were nearly identical to those claimed for the 911S by Porsche. The German government requires car manufacturers to certify performance which can be duplicated by any production model straight off the showroom floor. The factory figures are therefore ultraconservative and represent the slowest car within assembly-line tolerances. Careful tuning of a 911S with some mileage on it should hack close to a second off our 0-60 mph time of 6.5 seconds. Still, neither that, nor a quarter-mile in 15.2 seconds at 92 mph (with three gears yet to go) is bad for any high-performance car. For a little 2-liter sports car, it ranks with Robert Moses building a replica of the Great Pyramid of Cheops overnight.
The brakes on our test car left something to be desired, although—again—were enormously above average. The 911 and 912 have Ate-Dunlop solid discs on all four wheels; the 911S’s discs have internal radial venting. Vented discs are new to Porsche; so new, in fact, that Porsche has mistakenly laid claim to building the first sports car thus equipped. The Corvette Sting Ray has had vented discs since 1965, at which time Chevrolet claimed to be first with drums inside the rear discs for the parking/emergency brake. Porsche had had that feature since 1964, so perhaps the current German boast is just Porsche’s way of getting back at Chevy.
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