Archived Comparison
From the February 1974 Issue of Car and Driver
TESTED
The tachometer needle is closing in on the fourth gear redline. The speedometer indicates 105 mph. Bobby Allison is feeling the Porsche 911 into the wide, banked Turn One of Pocono's short road course. He has driven this section of the tri-oval dozens, maybe tens of dozens, of times before, always in a stock car . . . and always in the other direction. But that doesn't matter. Now he is turning right instead of left.
"You could really hang up your spare parts in this corner if something went wrong."
At this speed, the Porsche is toeing an awkward threshold. Aerodynamic forces have lifted its front enough to make the steering light and vague, yet very twitchy. The rear has lifted too and the tires are light enough to want to break out into a drift.
"I can feel it trying to hang but it can't quite do it."
Each time the tail comes loose, Allison catches it with a microscopic correction of the steering and an adjustment of his foot on the gas. But almost as soon as it's caught, the rear comes unstuck again. And each time it does, the onrushing boiler-plate wall seems to click into even sharper focus.
"It's telling me to expect something bad, it doesn't say how bad. It's not really a strain at this speed . . . we might even be able to run right to the mat in a few laps . . . but I just know better than to crowd it too soon. Porsches are quite a bit different from anything else I've driven . . . except maybe a Volkswagen and I've only driven VWs a minimum number of times."
Bobby Allison, successful driver and equally successful race car builder, feels no reverence toward the name Porsche. Which makes him the perfect driver to test the 1974 line-up of 2.7-liter Porsches. It's easy to find someone who has raced Porsches successfully, someone with a factory deal . . . or someone trying to carve out a factory deal . . . who will be more than happy to help out on a test such as this. And you'll get a glowing report. But Allison is non-aligned. With him, the chips fall where they may. And he points out exactly where that might be in a precise, deep, gentle drawl that does not leave room for misinterpretation. To be sure, Bobby Allison is a stock car driver, and, with more than forty NASCAR wins, an exceedingly competent one. But he is much too diverse to be categorized in that narrow pigeon hole. He has also won on road courses—Riverside this past summer to name a recent one—and driven open-wheelers for Roger Penske at Indy. He has even raced Porsches, at the Lime Rock Trans-Am last season and most recently as one of the select field of 12 at the International Race of Champions at Riverside just before this test. In fact, he even bought a new 911T to drive on the street in preparation for the IROC.
Like many of today's best drivers, Allison turns out to be more than just a driver. He is also a car builder. His shop in Hueyton, Alabama turns out parts and completed stock cars, as many as a hundred a year, for serious racers. So Bobby Allison knows about automobiles from both sides of the steering wheel. With credentials such as these, Allison's assignment for Car and Driver was to probe the performance and personality of Porsche's newest collection of road cars as represented by three models: a 911, a 911S Targa and a Carrera, $42,940 worth of rear-engine machinery.
Porsche's model line-up has undergone a substantial overhaul. The T and E models are gone. At the bottom of the new heap is the no-suffix 911 which lists for $9950 POE East Coast, plus everything. Up from there is the 911S. And that, in turn, is topped by the Carrera at $13,575, at that price as naked as the Venus de Milo.
There is bound to be confusion over the Carrera. You're probably thinking—or at least hoping—that it has much in common with the Carrera RSRs that have been mowing down the opposition around the world in GT racing and that made up the field for the IROC. It doesn't. It's a 911S overlayed with a few of the RSR's accoutrements: Carrera side stripes, the upturned rear deck spoiler (a "mandatory option" at $285), slightly flared rear fenders and wider (seven inches compared to six in front) rear wheels mounted with appropriately fatter tires.
