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I was looking through some "CAR" magazines I had purchased. In the August 2006 issue on page 99 there is an article about the Porsche 959 by Gavin Green, one of the writers for that magazine. He was referring to an article he had written about that car 19 years ago, which would be 22 years ago now. He indicated that in it's time, the 959 was a technical tour de force, pioneering variably split computer-controlled 4x4 and computer controlled damping stiffness. It was the fastest car of it's day, doing 0-60 in 3.7 seconds and topping out at 197 mph. He then added that the Porsche purists had a problem with the car because it wasn't as much fun to drive as a 911. The 911 purists complained that all that new-fangled electro-trickery took away the animal, and did not challenge the good drivers and intimidate the poor ones as the 911 was famous for. The author said that the 959 did not wag it's tail, oversteer outrageously, or require constant steering correction to extract big speeds. He said the 959 was a "point and squirt" supercar that was marvellously efficient and enormously fast, but it was also a touch "soulless" and more "engineering showcase than drivers delight". He said the 959 was the car that begat all the electronically controlled engineering-rich supercars of today, but the 911 purists did not like the car because it forgot to involve the bloke behind the wheel. This article was written a good two years before all the arguments we are having about the 911 vs. the GTR, but I think it explains why Porsche did not develop a car with all the computer control that characterizes the GTR.
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