By Dan Neil
Dan Neil/The Wall Street Journal
This is a writer’s prerogative. I have no reason to favor you with another review of a Porsche 911—the base model, no less ($92,185, as tested), just another cutie-patootie in the chorus line, with 19-inch summer tires, big steel brakes, and a seven-speed manual transmission. To be honest, in world of 580-hp Camaros, Chevrolet Z51s Corvettes and Nissan GT-Rs, the Porsche (350 hp/3,042 pounds) isn’t even unusually fast. But as I hand back the keys after a couple hundred miles of disporting, my heart is full.
The word that comes to mind is tailoring. After a couple of days these cars start to fit like bicycle shorts. It begins with the muscle memory required to enter and exit the low-slung machine gracefully, because the one thing you mustn’t ever do is tumble lamely out of the 911 as the valet holds the door. Spoils the effect.
And yes, OK, in the base model you do have to use a manual lever to adjust the steering column—no powered multiposition memory function—but once it’s set to preference, the 911 seems to wrap itself around the driver’s posture, secured by the deep-pocketed seats. Our car was fitted with the optional premium sports seats. (I would like to have eaten the steaks that were once inside this leather.) Visibility is great, fatigue is low, the steering wheel is superb, and the hip-to-heel geometry relative to the pedals is just about perfect. I’ve driven 911s for 12 hours at a stretch and they are surprisingly agreeable.
The weird thing is, almost everybody who drives a 911 for any length of time feels the same way. If you aren’t freakishly huge, or wee, the car feels almost as if it was tailored for you.
My theory on this has to do with numerosity. Think of all the arses that have been on the 911’s seats in decades of product development and ergonomic data collection (the 911 goes back to 1963 and the fabulously named Butzi Porsche). After thousands upon thousands of human samples, that data would stabilize and you would know, just freaking know, how to build a driver’s seat. And that seems to be the case here.
There are other interesting things about Rosebud. First, it has a seven-speed manual transmission, with a clutch pedal that the driver must operate with the left foot to engage and disengage the running engine from the drivetrain during gearshifts. This is affected by way of a mechanical-hydraulic linkage and a single clutch, somewhat like the new Studebaker (I’m kidding, there is no new Studebaker).
Standard transmissions in sports cars are going the way of the moa. Ferrari doesn’t sell one any more, and neither does Lamborghini. Porsche and a few other auto makers (GM, Ford, Fiat-Chrysler) offer them as atavistic tokens of their performance heritage, bending over backward to appeal the old, grouchy purists, but it’s a bit silly and all over the map. The bat-guano fast Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat (707 hp/10.8 seconds in the 1/4-mile) has an optional eight-speed automatic transmission. Might as well say TorqueFlite on it.
The 911 buyer’s other option is a seven-speed dual-clutch transmission, the fabulously named Porsche Doppelkupplung, or PDK, which essentially automates the function of a clutch pedal. (A quick primer on PDK: It involves two clusters of gears, 1-3-5-7 and 2-4-6-R, with two electrohydraulic clutches, arranged in such a way that one is primed to engage when the other disengages, thereby reducing the duration of loss of power during shifting to as little as a couple hundred milliseconds. Also known as flappy paddles.)
Around your average road-racing course, a PDK-equipped 911 of any stripe will embarrass its manually shifted twin. The PDK’s paddle-shifting, helpfully smoothed by the all-encompassing powertrain software, is nearly instant and precise, and it does exactly what it was designed to do, which is to help the driver put the power down and keep it down longer without all the messiness of stirring the gears. Since the driver’s workload is reduced, PDK also has an enabling effect on driving precision—mine, anyway. And it gives you a few more options in terms of shift strategy, too.
A dual-clutch automated manual transmission also has the advantage of a fully automatic mode, with the press of a button.
Functionally, the manual transmission, be it seven gears or 70, the “stick shift” as Buz and Tod would say, is obsolete in sports cars. Yes, right? We’re all agreed on that? Automated clutching = faster, better.
And can we not also agree that it’s a kind of madness to hang so lossy a thing as a manual gearbox on so rigorously optimized an engine as the 911’s: naturally aspirated 3.4 liters, in the classic horizontally opposed six-cylinder (flat or boxer engine) configuration, four cams, with phased timing and lift on the intake and exhaust valves, direct injection, 12.5:1 compression ratio, dry sump lubrication, and a brain of the purest silicon. Nominal output is 350 hp at 7,400 rpm and 287 lb-ft of torque.
To pair such a mill with a manual transmission is crippling.
The 911 with a stick accelerates from 0 to 60 in 4.6 seconds; with the PDK, that number is as low as 4.2 seconds (with the Sport Chrono package). A difference of four-tenths, officially! If you were a German transmission engineer and you were four-tenths of a second slower getting to the coffee pot in the morning they would bin you.
And yet there it is: I want, I would only have, the seven-speed manual transmission. First, because those few tenths at 100% throttle are not actually that important to me and I, personally, would never track my daily driver. Second, because Porsche’s seven-speed shifter is turned out so beautifully, with lustrous aluminum and taut leather, surrounded by a glove-soft leather gusset in the center console, almost steampunk in its elegant antiquation. Third, it’s a mechanical marvel: The weight, throw and uptake of the clutch pedal, the frictionless linkages, the gate-homing precision of the shifter, all impeccable, all to the sound of an upscale lumber mill.
To feather the clutch lightly up a hill, to rev impetuously and dump the clutch when the floodlights hit. Stop, thief! You’ve stolen our hearts.
But it’s mostly because when you’re good at something—a language, an instrument, or in my limited case, heel-and-toe downshifting—there is joy in doing it. A couple of mornings I caught myself skipping out to the car.
Another interesting thing: Our test car was de-badged; that is, the model designation typically displayed in brightwork letters on the rear of the car -- “911” or “911 Carrera,” for example—was omitted. Instead, spread handsomely across the stern was only the company’s name in blueprint capital letters.
Which kind of said it all.
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