Last year, I took our new (and first) Porsche to a track day. A DE day. Having lost my racing medical 17 years ago qualified me as a novice. My 'instructor' remarked that I could give him lessons in the racing line, but I wasn't giving anyone guff. I've been around sports cars and racing since those first 911's. Reputations like those models earned don't evaporate with a few months of milk toast driving. I had impressed a couple of friends who own Corvettes, and I had one entertaining hour playing hare and hounds with the local autocross champion on a deserted back road. But the truth was I was nowhere close to finding the limits of this car on public roads and I had no plans to change that. Any 911 is a bloody fast car when taken to the limit. No sane driver should ever be driving that fast on roads shared with untrained civilians.

That local autocross hotshoe is the guy I chose for my instructor incidentally. Nice guy, and I figured we'd have some fun exploring this latest model together. To his surprise, but not mine, my driving on track was conservative as well. That first track experience was frustrating. Partly because it's been thirty years since I drove anything on a track without five-point belts and a shell seat, and I felt... loose. Loosey goosey. That was part of it, but mostly I kept waiting to find the limits of all those active suspension elements, and the problems that cost me my medical have not improved in seventeen years. I had no wish to depart the Streets of Willow at 120 mph backwards and end up in a special kind of body shop. I kept it conservative the whole day.

Oh, I laughed about the fun of going over "the waterfall" at that track doing 110. That's what I said out loud. Privately, I was thinking about the eight or nine other corners, taken at mere freeway speeds like 70 or 80, and asking myself "How do you get this pig to rotate?"

My lovely Carrera had a bad case of John Deere. It plowed.

Afterward, I seriously considered buying something mundane and waterproof for a daily driver and looking for an eighties coupe for the occasional track day. Something without a nanny controlling the suspension. I decided to give it one more chance.

Two weeks ago, Zone 8 had another DE day at the Streets of Willow. I'd been doing some thinking about how to drive a car with PSM, PASM and the rest of the alphabet sharing my ride. That same instructor and I experimented a little in the first couple of sessions, but basically his 1984 coupe with corner-balanced dropped suspension and race rubber just doesn't offer too many hints about how to drive a current street model track fast. Road fast, certainly, but quick on a track has a lot to do with rhythm and transitions and I kept feeling like the computers (or just passive design choices) were interfering with my fun. Not to mention my not trusting them collectively.

David arranged for a couple of conversations with drivers of current models with PSM and PASM. Details are not worth repeating but I considered their comments over the lunch hour, along with the results of our experiments in the morning sessions, and I began to believe there may be no alligators waiting behind PSM to bite the *** of a driver foolish enough to push beyond its limits. John Deere perhaps, but nothing more savage. This wasn't necessarily a thrilling conclusion. Who wants a $100k plow? It looked like time to consider mods or a Lotus Seven *** Buick driving arrangement. But the day wasn't done.

In the afternoon, we went from sun to sleet to rain and back to sun. Very inventive weather and a great time to explore the limits of a car with summer tires mounted, but for my session the weather had cleared and the track had dried. I ended up in a cluster when we queued up for the passing opportunity behind a 944. Nice car and polite driver, but not one to keep pace with a well-driven Lotus [Elise maybe?], a 930 Turbo, and... a 914??? Oh yeah. Don't embarrass yourself bragging too loud around a 914 driver until you carefully check under the lid or follow the car for a few laps. This one turned out (in a post-mortem inquiry) to have a current 3.6 engine and heaven knows what else in the way of suspension mods. Very quick.

So the four of us spent about three laps getting acquainted as the cluster formed from being behind that 944 and a couple of other cars of similar speed. Then we all got into the same open space and I had this little problem with a dangling Y chromosome. All those racing instincts came back.

Very interesting session. I quit thinking about technique and just asked for whatever this car could give me. After a few laps, the gear selection failed on the Lotus and he dropped out. Then the Turbo let the 914 by in the passing zone, but ostentatiously closed the door on me. [Yes. He got a lecture afterward from the staff.] Being used to racing, I didn't even think about it at the time, but it did entice me to persuade him he was the slower car/driver. Purely a benevolent desire to ensure he has a realistic view of his abilities of course. An instructional goal. Nothing to do with that chromosome.

I loved it. This Carrera S ate up that 930 Turbo -- as it should with a fifty horsepower difference -- but not just on the straights. Once I said to hell with it and went looking for the fastest line to humiliate... uh, tutor this guy, I found a new level for this car. Not only the most fun I've had with this newish car, but the most fun in a car I've had for seventeen years.

Conclusion. This won't surprise anyone who's been to Porsche's driving school, but I had to find out the long way that they've built a level of protection into the current design. If an ordinary driver, or a trained one caught off guard in extraordinary circumstances, should overstep the amazing limits of routine adhesion, then John Deere will drag your butt back from disaster. The car will plow. At forty, or sixty or ninety, according to my track experiments, this is reliable behavior. And quite appropriate as a design if you want return business from untrained drivers. But when a trained driver asks for more...

Since this isn't a training course, I don't care to leak just enough information to get someone hurt, so I won't go into details. But when I said "screw it" and set out to run down that group of quick drivers, my C2S responded like a race car. It felt amazingly like my last Formula Ford, though I admit it's been nearly two decades now. What I can swear to is that it did not plow, it was keeping up with that Lotus and the mid-engined 914/6+ in the twisty bits while eating them on the straight. And the poor 930 was spending half his time sideways trying to stay ahead. (I had to keep dropping back to make it entertaining to catch him on the next half lap.)

The car felt light on its feet, very well balanced, and responsive to the throttle in corners. And it had the best brakes of the four, which wouldn't be surprising except that the 914 was what we call a 'prepared' car and certainly didn't have stock brakes.

After seventeen months, I get it. And I love it.

I heartily encourage serious training for anyone who'd like to learn what a current 911 can do. This doesn't involve the sort of "let's not get bent here" driving I would teach a novice at a DE day who wants to learn how to go fast, and I doubt any DE instructor would take you further. Beyond PSM lives a race car, but you won't get there trying to tip toe past John Deere. If you want to find this higher level of your car's abilities, you'll need more intense training for yourself.

Preferably in somebody else's car.

Gary

 

Great write-up, Gary.. You certainly elevated my interest levels. I plan to do the Barber event sometime this year, your post above only heightened my desire to do so now.

 

Well worth it. I was not entirely reconciled to buying half a Formula Ford for Skip if I screwed the pooch badly, but the essential freedom of not having to beg a ride to work on Monday let me learn far more in his school than I ever had in a family car, however sporting it might have been.

That was about 1985 and I'd been running events of various sorts for twenty years, but three days with Skip Barber instructors made me confident in the things I'd learned right from books like Paul Frere's and from pit conversations with trophy winners, while it also corrected some errors I hadn't been aware of and then took me into regions I'd never even considered before.

As an example of that middle category, something every pilot knows had slipped away in driving fast cars: always stay in control. Well, how obvious can you be? But in the quest to be smooth, which is essential to being quick, I somehow had begun to under-correct. An alert instructor caught that by standing at the side of the road observing me dealing with the turn 3-4-5 complex at Big Willow. "Catch it sooner. Smooth if you can, but always catch it. Full lock if you need it."

When you want to get as good as you can be, you can't match the experience of being observed by professional instructors who do this forty hours a week.

Gary

 

Looks like you had a great time Gary. A nice read to start my day...thanks!

 

Gary: Fantastic post. As you found out, it's all about smoothness.