THE TURBO LADDER

Fifty years ago, Porsche bolted 'ein Turbolader' to the 911 and created a legend. Richard Lane drives three of the best

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Bruntingthorpe, rather a long time ago. It's the day of Autocar's 0-100-0 showdown, and a nasal sounding 911 with crescent-shaped cutouts in its flanks has just split the difference between two cars that, by comparison, are so 'super' they may as well have turned up wearing capes. One of them is a flyweight Pagani costing three times as much as the Porsche. It has, by the lacquer of its carbon clamshell, escaped with dignity intact, wailing to 100mph and back with 1.18sec to spare over the Porsche. Not so spared are the blushes of the Murciélago. The Lamborghini has twice the piston-count of the Porsche and a kerbside malevolence that renders the German coupé all but invisible. Yet it gets eaten alive. Beaten to 30mph, then to 50mph. By 100mph the delta is wider still. Twisting the blade, the 911 stops harder, underscoring its status as everyone's favourite giant-slayer of the early noughties.

For your barely teenage scribe, gripped by the resulting report in the magazine, this was real heroic stuff from a little 911. And if speed alone (still a much-admired commodity in 2002) wasn't enough, the Porsche's aura was enhanced by it being so obviously the underdog, and by it being considerably more relatable than the V12 exotics. Anybody, even a 13-year-old in Cardiff, could head to their nearest dealer and ogle one of these freakish, Clark Kent-esque creations and perhaps even slide behind the dials for a moment or two, if you asked nicely enough.