The 911SC Chronicles, Part V: Crispy

Almost 3 months have passed since I bought my "new" 25 year old car.  The weather has warmed up considerably and the rain has washed the salt off the roads.  I can now drive the car a bit more confidently, as the low pavement temperatures were quite a concern for me.  These older 911s have a reputation of being rather wicked on curvey roads should the driver not respect the car.  The razor-sharp edge of the traction envelope was not something I wanted to experience on a car I am not very familiar with, plus the tires were new.  The silver lining in this cloud is that I had an opportunity to spend some time in the car and its controls before I unleashed it around a bend.

This 911 is a fun car, there is no doubt about that.  I can see why many owners of older 911s call them toys, but that does not keep me from driving the 911 a lot, especially now that the heater works.  I will try to quickly describe the driving experience in two categories: the sensory experience and the handling experience.

The sensory experience has to deal with the stimulus the car liberally showers its driver with.  This is a ever-present, almost regardless of speed.  With the current gentler air temperatures, I have been able to roll down the window and listen to the engine's sound even better as I am driving the car.  The shortened diameter of the 930S steering wheel this car came with(compared to the diameter of the original steering wheel) appears to accentuate the manual steering feel of the car.  It is elementary physics, the lever arm's length is shorter with this steering wheel, hence more force is required to apply the same amount of torque.  One can feel the undulations of the road around the corners and that feel changes as the weight transfers from the front to the rear (foreshadowing about the handling experience section).  I have already talked about the shifting of the 915 transmission and heel-toe, so I will not repeat that here.  The brakes on the car are very good, by the way.  Having the engine over the rear tires must have allowed the Porsche engineers to allow for a lot of brake pressure in the rear brakes.  The brake system does not seem to be nearly as front-biased as it is on most cars.  The braking feels very stable and even at both ends of the car.

The handling experience is the part that was a new and welcome development to me, as I had hardly pushed the car through a road's curve in the past.  What is prominent is how much the attitude of the car changes as a function of the throttle input.  I have not tried (nor plan) to go sideways through a corner on a street, but I have been playing with affecting the rear tires' slip angle using the throttle.  It really is a lot of fun.  A friend had mentioned the crisp throttle response of an early 911 he had been in and I think I now understand what he was talking about..  Under load and below 3500rpm, the engine itself is not necessarily characterized by a very crisp throttle response.  And yet, that response is still enough to produce a noticable (crispy) effect in how it affects the chassis, the weight transfer, the oversteer and understeer of the car. The car goes from its usual understeer to mild oversteer fairly easily upon extra throttle application.

To highlight the effect, I feel like I need to be driving my 951 fairly quickly to feel the effects of throttle transition at the levels I feel them on this 911. This makes the fun factor of driving my 911 a lot more "accessible". One does not need to go "screaming" around the corner to be able to play.  When road conditions permit, I can play with the placement of the car in a corner's entry, how I reach the apex, how I "power" through the corner.  The very direct feeling of this car seems to tell me exactly how well I have picked the line.  The 951 is certainly a fun car, but its fun factor through a corner revolves around completely different parameters as the 911 requires a lot more attention and active effort to go around a corner.  I feel like I need to steer the 911 around the corner.  In comparison, one feels the 951 corners with hardly any drama or effort.  I would expect that one would feel the same difference if they were to go around a corner first in my 1987 951 and then a 2004 996, making my 951 feel the more involving of the two cars in the driving process.

I have strayed very little from the factory recommended tire pressures as I prefer (for now anyway) a somewhat understeering car.  Once I learn the car a bit better, I might change the pressures to see how that affects the car's behavior in the corners.  I can see how this 911 would be a lot less forgiving than other cars if I were to change my mind in the middle of a corner.  It seems that one would have to choose a line through a corner and commit to it, failing to do so might lead to an off-road excursion.  The car is not as down-right wicked as my 951 was before it got its proper alignment, but I expect a stable and controllable four-wheel drift might not be as easy to achieve(with my current driving skills anyway).  I have not been pushing the envelope hard, so I can only get glimpses as what the car would do if provoked.  I generally strive for smoothness while driving, so this might be "masking" some of the chassis' responses in extreme trailing throttle, trail-braking, etc situations.  Being able to heel-toe ever since adjusting the brake pedal's height has been instrumental in making much of this playing possible, by the way.

Speaking of corners, one of the implications of having lots of engine weight on the rear brakes is that I feel like I could possibly go "deeper" into a corner than I can with front-engined cars before the rear end steps out due to the forward weight transfer.  My concern is that at some point that rear weight will start behaving as an inverse pendulum, resulting in a majestic spin.  I will have to slowly explore this aspect of the car's driving characteristics.  So far, it seems that on dry pavement at legal speeds, there should be no inadvertent tête-a-queue.  

I do not know yet if ultimately this car can be as fast through the corners as my 951 is.  I am not ignoring the fact that my 951 has stickier tires than my 911 does.  Stickier tires would probably tame some of the willingness with which the chassis switches from understeer to oversteer, but it might also make edge of traction conditions a lot trickier.  Being able to discover the car's limitations at slower speeds is an opportunity that I welcome.  The 951's MOMO wheels with their Z-rated tires would fit the 911 perfectly, so on a nice day, I might just install the MOMOs on the SC and see what the car is like with stickier tires.
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Last Updated Fri Mar 9 12:10:49 CST 2004