And speaking of that 911...
This isn't really garage related, but I'll post it here anyway because I'm a little bit 'car proud.'
My 911 is not the fastest street car or track car, but it's a pretty cool compromise if you consider that I haven't sunk a huge amount of money into it. Porsche keeps improving its cars, and Motor Trend magazine recently took a look at Porsche's latest and greatest at my home track -- Willow Springs (which, I tend to remind people, is the oldest continuously-operating road course in North America, and also probably the fastest, based on average lap speed).
Motor Trend brought out the new Porsche super car, the 918, and also the 50th-Anniversary version of the 911 (aka the 991). Both were driven by Randy Pobst -- who used the 918 to set a new production-car lap record of 1:23.54. He also set a new bar for an off-the-showroom-floor 911 with a 1:28.93 in the 50th-Anniversary Edition 991.
Now, my car is not off-the-showroom-floor stock, at all. But it is a street driven car. And like these newer Porsches, I track it on the same tires I drive on the street (no trailer). So it was interesting for me to see where the data diverges between those newer cars and my 42-year-old model. The newer cars (obviously) have horsepower on their side. They also have slightly better tires (the new r-compound Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2). But my car is much lighter.
The 918 weighs 3692 pounds and has 887 hp (from both its engines and its motors). The 50th Anniv 911 weighs 3109 pounds and has 430 hp. My car weighs 2609 pounds and has 272 hp. So, the gap is pretty great.
The technological miracle, the 887-hp 918:
The 430-hp 50th-Anniversary 911:
And the artist-in-residence of the 12-Gauge Garage, my 272 hp 1972 911:
What Motor Trend did that was cool was to publish the data from the two cars during the lap around Willow. Now, to most people it's just a jagged line. But I deal with the data enough from my car to be familiar with all nine corners of the track and the speed I know I can carry through each of them. So I grabbed the line from my own data and set it on top of the Motor Trend graphic. I also included (in red) my minimum and maximum speeds for the different corners.
Click on the image for a large-and-legible version.
My car is in between the two new ones, laptime-wise. But it was surprising to see that I was carrying more speed through the turn 2 sweeper than the 918 -- which recently set a production car record at the Nurburgring by shattering the seven-minute barrier.
I was also surprised when I clipped out the more-technical part of the track to compare segment times between me and the 911. As it happens, the section I cut out (from the exit of turn 1 to the entrance to turn 5) was covered in the same amount of time by both the 918 and my old car.
Nothing earth-shaking here, other than the fun of seeing my car match the pace of a 2015 super car that sells for $845,000.
VIDEO: Side by side, turns 1 through 5.
Does this mean my old Volkswagen-derived suspension is as good as Porsche's 2015 super car? Of course not. The difference is that my car weighs a thousand pounds less than the 918. And while Porsche has been able to make that thousand pounds 'disappear' when it comes to acceleration and braking, there's apparently a point where the laws of physics kick in and you can only move a given weight around a corner at a certain speed. Obviously, if you added a thousand pounds of penalty weight to my car, I would be MUCH slower through that corner. And if you took a thousand pounds off of the 918, it would be MUCH faster through that corner. And no matter how you slice it, the 918 is faster than me around the whole track.
But it makes me wish Porsche would not only develop this kind of 'super-high-tech testing bed' type of super car, but maybe also make one where the goal is 800 hp in a simple, effective 2,600 pound car. It would break the production car lap record at every track on earth -- and even I might start scheming to become a hedge fund manager (or whatever) so I could afford one.
