GT Silver, three pedals, barely a crease in the leather seats. It’s joined by a similarly low-mileage 930 and a late 993 that even at a standstill has bottomless charm. They cover only three of the seven generations of 911 Turbo but are nicely representative. The 930 got the ball rolling in 1974, the 996 set the tone for the modern-era Turbo as we now know it, and the 993 bridges those two worlds.
We should probably get on and drive the things, starting with the 996. The 911 Turbo of the millennium may not have been blessed with the finest cabin or the most charismatic looks, but it packs a legendary motor.
Not that you would know it at first. This 444bhp flat six, precisely 3600cc in volume, fires quickly and quietly, such that you really have to concentrate to pick out its various mechanical idiosyncrasies.
Then, out on the open road, even by the comparatively muted standards of turbocharged high-performance motors, it isn’t exactly effusive, delivering a breathy wall of propulsive muscle that is exciting more for its unrelenting physicality than its emotional appeal.
This engine’s specialness resides in the fact that its design largely mimics that of the 1998 Le Mans-winning Porsche GT1. The unit is unrelated to the 3.4-litre flat six in the backside of the mainline 911 Carrera, which was intended only for street application.
This may or may not be fresh information to you, but at the time Porsche needed to homologate an engine for its 911-based racers – a painfully expensive undertaking given the small volumes involved. Step forward the 911 Turbo.
If the Turbo could use a blown version of the dry-sumped GT1-style flat six earmarked for the racing 911s (and their road-going GT2/GT3 counterparts), costs would be better recouped.
As a consequence, the 996 Turbo carries an engine not only massively powerful but also tough enough for motorsport, with links to the 962. Porsche geeks would call it a real ‘Mezger’ engine, after powerplant supremo Hans Mezger.
There’s something undeniably special about having such an engine secreted away behind you. Elsewhere, this 996 is certainly more silken on the move than expected.
