NoGaBiker

Couldn't agree with you more. Surprising beasts in real life, even when they get a few years on them. Here's a little write-up of a surprising encounter I had last fall in my 996TT X50 with some fast cars (posted on another forum at the time):

I'm coming home from a wonderful afternoon playing in the nearly deserted NoGa mountains 75 minutes north of me. The main artery is GA 400, a four-lane road with a very big grassy median between directions. For the first 17 miles it has traffic lights every mile or two, then becomes full-fledged interstate after that.

Traffic is heavy-ish because there's a big outlet mall at the north end, and we're all heading south back to town. Up ahead, maybe 30 cars, I get a suggestion of sportscar, then another. Can't make them out at this distance; maybe a V8 Esprit? Low and wide and Giugiaroish-looking. There's the familiar wide-body *** of a 911 waterpumper of some sort. And something else low and wide, that's all I can tell.

As we progress slowly forward, I'm able to gain a little ground after each light, though not easily, and it takes me pretty much all of the controlled-access part of the trip to get within range. But then I can see them: Gallardo, GT3RS, and GTR, just a few cars ahead now. Stopped at the light.

Luck favors me when the light changes and the guy in their lane and right behind them is texting or something, so he sits there when my lane starts moving. I get just enough of a run to slip in front of him before he wakes up and puts his phone down. So now I can just mash the pedal and pull right up behind the dark red Lambo. The Porsche is in front of him, and the Nissan is first.

A bit of fun cut and thrust ensued for the next couple of miles, until the last light was behind us and it was pure, clear interstate now. Coincidentally, at this point the Nissan is in the left lane, the GT3 in the right, I'm behind the Nissan, and the Lambo is behind the Porsche.

So the Nissan hammers it. I must have been caught in his slipstream vacuum or something, because I found myself doing the same thing. I hear the Lambo and the GT3 screaming louder than either of the turbo cars, but they cannot hold their own.

The Nissan opens the gap by a length initially, just as I expected. This is, after all, the car that bested the 997 GT2, iirc, in some N-Ring shootout. So I'm just along to have fun and see what the various cars will do.

Then I'm amazed to find that after a certain speed, the old 996TT is able to reel the GTR in and I had to actually modulate the throttle since we were in the same lane. I didn't know these guys, and they were all together, and I didn't want to whip over in the right lane like this was some mano-a-mano thing. Really just did want to have fun, wave at each other, and go our merry ways eventually.

Of course, with a 65mph speed limit we all refused to exceed that speed, as that would have been against the law.

But extrapolating from the rate we were accelerating up to 65, it felt very much like if we had been on a closed track, under controlled conditions, with professional drivers at the respective helms, and safety crews at the ready, the 996 would have beaten the GTR to 125 mph. More than once. Pure speculation on my part, of course.

Again, that theoretical calculation really surprised me. I would have never pitted the Turbo against a GTR if I cared about the results, because I assumed there was no way. I don't have very much done to the Turbo at all -- header and exhaust and a bit of remapping is pretty much it. Stock it's 450/467, so I'm confident it's under 500/500 the way I have it.

Anyway, a fun afternoon, when you consider the main fun was had up in the mountains on some of the very best sportscar roads in this fair land. Most of the good ones, including Wolfpen Gap, had a very nice new coat of asphalt on them, with no sand spread for ice or snow yet, and the leaves already gone so no peepers clogging the roads. When I'd come up behind a civilian in the twisty bits where passing would have been dangerous, I'd just stop in the road with one eye on my rear view and the other on my stop watch; wait 45-60 seconds, then blast off again. These roads have no driveways or side roads coming in, so nobody can fill your gap between you and the guy ahead.