Every time I drop into the driver’s seat of
a Porsche Cayman, a single thought jolts my mind: “How can I get one of these
into my life?” And sure enough it does this time, at 2,509 metres above sea
level at the top of the Timmelsjoch at the Italian-Austrian border. The thought
of the Cayman is enough to divert me from the views, tumbling down to valleys
slashed in the landscape below and up to dizzying battalions of jagged Dolomite
peaks crowning the horizon. And it’s even enough – just – to ameliorate my sad
parting from the Ferrari 458 Speciale that’s lit up my day so far. And also
enough to calm the giddy anticipation that tomorrow I’ll be swapping this
Porsche for another, vastly more stellar: the 918.
With
its V8 howl, pulverising performance, top handling and racing heritage, the
Speciale is one of the greatest performance cars
How do you compare the best fast
mid-engined sports car that $83,625 can buy, the Cayman S, with another, the
Ferrari, that’s four times as much, never mind the 918 that’s 15 times as much?
Or 325bhp with 605 with 888? You don’t. You just enjoy them. And not just by
driving around in circles. Oh no. This is to be an epic relay. It begins by
collecting a 458 Speciale from its home in Maranello and taking it to some of
Italy’s highest, most epic roads. At the border I toss aside its key and head
down the other side of the pass into Austria in the Cayman S, for a night flit
across that country and the quieter corners of south Germany to a morning
rendezvous in the Schwarzwald with the 918 Spyder. Tracing through the forest
and along some autobahn, the trip winds up at the 918’s developmental home, the
Porsche engineering centre at Weissach.
The
Porsche 918 is the most technologically advanced and complex sports car that
Porsche has ever released
But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. We
start with the four-point harnesses of the 458 pulled tight, the barking-mad V8
awoken to a sharp idle, the factory barrier rising, the Speciale trundling out
into suburban, industrial Maranello, its truck-choked roads traversing a plain
to the A1 autostrada, Italy’s transport backbone. This stuff is generally
glossed over in Ferrari driving features, but already it’s clarifying the
Speciale’s character.
Its name isn’t fibbing. The Speciale is a
special case, its powertrain not entirely housetrained for this sort of
dawdling. However gentle you are, every gearshift is as good as instant,
play-kicking your body through the seat. Even as the rev-counter passes a mere
3,000rpm, the exhaust flaps open and an edgy boom vibrates your spine and bawls
at whomever’s nearby. You can’t just grease unobtrusively through traffic. As
if you ever would pass unnoticed, what with those stripes and shark-like
side-fins and frontal ‘turning vanes’ and an active rear diffuser to dwarf the
Channel Tunnel.
The
Porsche Cayman S is a visual standout from every angle, inside and out
Soon we’re onto the autostrada, first
skirting Modena and then off northward in the direction of the Brenner Pass.
Stopping for a toll gate, I smile and tense my muscles and senses for the
time-honoured game of joyous flat-out acceleration: nought-to-unmentionable.
You don’t just idly let the Speciale apply its entire efforts to the road. You
give it due consideration. The way it hurls itself to vanishing point demands
maximum alertness.
