In its current form, the Porsche 911 Turbo has a maximum power output of 493bhp. Not so very long ago, this would have been regarded as a quite shattering statistic, but in 2011 it has become almost unworthy of comment. Aston Martin, BMW, Jaguar, Mercedes-Benz and Range Rover all offer more, and it's not even the highest figure available in the 911 range - the Turbo S pumps out no less than 523bhp. But you don't think of any of this when you put your foot down in the "standard" 911 Turbo.What you think is "oh, my" or "well, I'll go to the foot of our stairs" or some equivalent of those. Under full acceleration, the Turbo erupts towards the horizon and makes you feel not so much that you are going with it as that your unwilling body is being hauled along regardless.All this is accompanied by a strange aural effect peculiar to turbocharged high-performance engines. Among other things, a turbo acts as a silencer for an engine's intake system, and in the case of the 911 this means that the engine note is quite distant compared to that of a naturally-aspirated 911. It's also less evocative, but there is enough of it - and the quality is sufficiently impressive - to ensure that the Turbo doesn't sound boring. Quietly menacing, rather, like the soundtrack of a horror film just before The Monster is revealed in its full and dreadful glory.If you have £110,000 or so burning a hole in your pocket, this is possibly enough to justify the purchase on its own. So is the startling performance (0-62mph in 3.6 seconds). So is the appearance, for this is a more than somewhat arresting-looking car. And so, frankly, is the fact that it costs £110,000, at least among people who like to show how much money they are able to spend.Whether the driving experience as a whole is worth a six-figure sum is another matter. I'm aware that there are people who believe that a 911 Turbo is the ultimate driver's car, but I have never yet driven one - no, not even this one - which I would happily live with.The problem, of course, (and it's one that Porsche is aware of but has no need to do anything about while 911s remain as popular as they have been for decades) is that that wonderful engine is mounted in entirely the wrong place, behind the rear axle rather than in front of it. Not for the first time I'm left wondering just how awe-inspiring a car the 911 might be in mid-engined form - or, which amounts to the same thing, what would happen if Porsche decided to create a 500bhp version of the vastly superior Cayman.But neither of these things has happened, and they seem unlikely to happen. Since the 911 Turbo is so fabulously quick in a straight line and so clumsy through the bends - unsure whether it wants to understeer or oversteer, but permanently sure that it wants to do one or the other - that it's best to think of acceleration and cornering as two completely separate activities, and to indulge in them strictly on a one-at-a-time basis.It's also important to point out that this is entirely because of the car's hysterically rear-heavy weight distribution and nothing to do with the way Porsche's chassis engineers have played the hand they were dealt. The suspension is fabulously well devised, being both soft and sufficiently well-damped to give the tyres as much chance as possible to maintain their grip on the road before the mass of the engine starts to take over.One curious result of this is that the 911 Turbo has an astonishingly comfortable ride. It soaks up the bumps far more effectively than the look of those low-profile tyres would lead you to believe, and because of both that and the low noise levels when you're not pushing hard the Turbo turns out to be a car in which I would happily set off for the south of France, confident in the knowledge that I would need to stop more often for fuel than to stretch my legs.For that reason, the 911 Turbo is a very, very fine car in the old Grand Touring tradition, with enough power to let you overtake almost anything almost anywhere. The fact that I don't consider it to be up to much on any road with interesting corners may simply mean that I'm missing the point. Engine 3800 cc, 6 cylinders Power 493bhp Transmission 6-speed manual Fuel/CO2 24.4 mpg / 272 g/km Acceleration 0-62mph: 3.7sec Top speed 194 mph Price From £110232.00 approx Release date 21/11/2009
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