Porsche is charging tens of thousands more than a GT2 or a GT3 RS for a car of menial mechanical background

Define cynical? Okay. Take a car, a Porsche 911 C4S. First, convert it to two-wheel drive. Then tweak the rear bumper, punch the roof from the inside (twice), paint it grey, bung a herd of heifers at the interior and, to garnish, dust down a famous bootlid spoiler from Porsche’s past. Finally, bolt on four Fuchs-style 19in alloys and, trading on the wheel/spoiler combo, slap on a retro name. Sport Classic perhaps.

A little bit of me died when I first saw the Sport Classic. Honestly, I didn’t know how to react, so as in all cases of extreme shock my body decided for me. It gave the most pathetic, wheezing, whimpering exhale. No words, no exclamations, just slow-moving air. ‘Abomination!’ is what it wanted to say; ‘Pffffffft,’ is what it did say.

Then the price was released and incredulity gave way to laughter. Porsche, we were told, was going to charge over $ 200K for a pimped 997 Carrera. Far, far more than a Turbo or a GT2 or a GT3 RS, for a car of menial mechanical background.

I wanted to boycott this car. I didn’t want to acknowledge its existence, and the principled part of me decided that when the call came from Porsche inviting me to drive the thing I’d plead ignorance: ‘Sport Classic? I have no knowledge of such a vehicle, nor, if it does exist, would I like to drive it.’

Curiosity is a dangerous drug, though. The same instinct that persuades a child to insert its finger into a crab’s open claw convinced me that I had to see this ungodly freak. Think of it as a public execution, I say to myself as we trundle to Porsche’s Driving Experience Centre at Silverstone. In the event of it being even more execrable in the flesh than in the photos, I have taken the precaution of bringing a can of fuel and some matches.

‘It does look very, very good, the Sport?Classic. Irritatingly good. It’s almost enough to justify the absurd price’

And there it is, sitting in the main atrium, resplendent in primer grey, beaming its $ 222K grin. As I wander around it and absorb its form,?my thoughts wander off to all the cars that Porsche has denied us, all the special gear that never made production, the fact that we have yet to drive a factory-approved lightweight Cayman with 400bhp. And as the resentment builds alongside the urge to fetch the fuel can, a murky corner of my brain registers a thought and commutes it to words. ‘Damn that looks good,’ it says.

Oh cock. It does look very, very good, the Sport Classic. Irritatingly good. Standing in its perfectly lit spot, it does as good a job of justifying its absurd price as could be expected of a natty looking 911. But I’m still faintly nauseous in its presence. This should be alleviated by a guided tour of the car’s unique features by two of the team members behind the idea, but sadly it isn’t. As I’m talked through the finer details of the Sport Classic – and there are several dozen – I am singularly unexcited by almost all of them because nothing, save the power kit that brings an added 22bhp (taking the total to 402bhp), concerns performance. Give me a special version of a car and I want there to be tangible gains in the driving experience. Because you choose to read this magazine, I suspect you do too. Unfortunately for me, this car is mostly about appearance, and much as I like stuff to look good, leather air-vent surrounds don’t get me up in the morning.

That said, new clock faces, a new gearlever, new seats and new door-cards certainly make the Sport Classic feel special, and there’s simply not the space here to list everything that has been covered in leather or re-trimmed to look and feel more appealing. In fact, the attention to detail borders on the weird. By way of example, I offer you the leather-wrapped coat hook on the back of the front seats. The only people who will ever see this modification are the poor children squeezed into those little kidney-bowl rear seat squabs, or the few people who actually use those hooks. I don’t know what it costs to cover that weeny plastic prong with leather, but it must be a lot, and much as I admire the skill involved in trimming of this quality, I’m still left wondering what might be possible if you threw the same moolah at the mechanical parts of the car.

‘At least there are no worries about the driving abilities of this machine…’

Of course, Porsche has a compelling answer to that question. It’s called the GT3 RS. And because Porsche still builds cars like the GT3 and the RS, even I can begin to entertain the thinking behind this car. Of the few thousand people who buy those high-performance 911s, how many do so because the spicy versions look ten times harder than the standard car, and what value do they attach to scarcity? In order, I’d hazard quite a few, and a great deal. Rare stuff is good news, which is why the run of 250 Sport Classics has already been sold.

Personal experience helps me to understand the price tag too. A few years ago I had an old 911 built and the bills for the small amount of trimming we did on the car still haunt me. High quality, low-volume trim work is one of the few areas of modern car production that’s virtually impossible to do on the cheap. It’s easy to see how Porsche has thrown perhaps twenty five thousand dollars at the interior alone. Conceptually, as a petrolhead, that’s anathema to me. But I can still see where the money’s been spent and appreciate the results.

And then there’s the bodywork. How they managed to get this thing passed for production is quite beyond me. You try approaching the line manager at a car factory and asking if you can insert 250 units with double-bubble roofs, the wrong front axle assembly and an exhaust system that barely fits in the space provided. He must have called security. And, again, the costs are terrifying. You don’t just design a new rear bumper and aerofoil, you have to crash it countless times, stick it in the wind tunnel and generally burn cash to make the project stick.

At least that line manager needn’t have worried about the driving abilities of the machine that buggered-up his production process. There is some mechanical intrigue here. I say some, because despite being moderately 911 obsessed, even I have never wondered how a wide-body, two-wheel-drive 997 Carrera would drive, but this car provides an answer nonetheless: pretty damn well.

‘The Sport Classic is an interesting, harmless diversion, a curiosity’

There’s a frisson of specialness as you insert the key into the lock barrel that is now carefully draped in, you’ve guessed it, leather. You grasp the expensive-feeling, hand-stitched wheel and glance at the new clock faces, but otherwise it’s hard to describe firing up the Sport Classic as a memorable experience. Porsche has deliberately modified the drivers’ contact points, though. The seat is a different shape, and feels good, the aforementioned wheel is unavailable in any other Porsche and the gearlever is also unique to this model.

The Sport Classic is fitted as standard with the Sport chassis pack (optional on the Carrera) that brings different spring and damper rates, a 20mm reduction in ride height and a limited-slip differential, and the resulting ride comfort is a genuine surprise. The extra traction from the 305-section rear tyres is noticeable, but then again the Sport Classic also reminds us how little the ordinary 997’s four-wheel-drive system contaminates its steering.

It goes well enough too, although it never feels that much quicker than a standard 380bhp Carrera?S (the 0-100kph time is cut by just 0.1sec, to 4.6, and the top speed remains 302kph), but you do benefit from a much more appealing exhaust noise. It’s clearly been tuned to sound like an early ’70s ‘S’, and it partially succeeds. In keeping with the retro vibe, the Sport Classic can only be had with a manual six-speed gearbox (PDK isn’t offered), to which a standard-fit short-shift kit brings a more rewarding gearshift action. The ratios themselves, meanwhile, are well suited to the car’s power and torque curves.

The carbon-ceramic brakes (also standard) are typical PCCB fare, lacking in initial bite but pretty fearsome after that, and if we’re being picky the car’s extra width might bring some traction benefits but it also makes the car less useable on tight roads.

This being a 911 with an LSD, and with an empty, wet circuit at our disposal, it’s only natural that we do some slithering, but do you know what? Even though the car has a natural balance that marks it out as the most appealing ‘regular’ Carrera model, it somehow feels wrong to be arsing about in it. In the same way caning a beautifully prepared classic machine feels disrespectful, so does nailing the Sport Classic. Silly really – it responds very well to such treatment.

I am glad that I drove the Sport Classic. It isn’t my sort of car, and I suspect it isn’t yours either, but of course that doesn’t make it a bad car. It succeeds in adding some glamour to the model range, and in the ranks of what is now the vast Porsche 997 family I am less offended by its existence than I was a few months ago because I’ve since driven the new GT3 RS. I have used this argument to defend the Cayenne for years: I don’t care what Porsche does on the periphery if it continues to give us those special sports cars. The Sport Classic is an interesting, harmless diversion – a curiosity for those with the inclination and the folding.

It isn’t objectively worth $ 201K of anyone’s money, but it’s a lovely looking object and the business case underpinning it has already been proved. So far, 15 have been sold in the Middle East alone. Mind you, if this ‘fashion’ fad spreads too far and we never see that hot Cayman, the fuel can and matches are ready…