- I drove the glorious 2020 Porsche 718 Spyder, a high-performance convertible two-seater that goes for a well-optioned $105,780.
- The Spyder has a new 414-horsepower flat-six engine that's devoid of turbochargers and, in my car, mated to a crisp six-speed manual transmission.
- The Spyder traces it lineage to the open-air racers of the 1950s.
- It isn't a practical car, but it is the best Porsche money can buy — and, for me, a ticket to happiness.
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"The colors tremble and vibrate."
That's a line from the title poem in Frederick Seidel's 1998 collection "Going Fast," a work crammed with references to the motorcycles Seidel loves.
Speed is a combination of reality and perception — we understand it as it's happening — and on a motorbike, you'd better be processing what's going on and doing it with all available gray matter and muscle memory.
The colors don't tremble or vibrate quite as much in a car. In many cars, they're positively immobile. But as I'm not riding these days, I take what I can get from four-wheelers.
A few weeks ago, Porsche lent me a 718 Spyder, model year 2020. Over a week's time, I didn't just reacquaint myself with the trembling and the vibrating. I found some new colors.
Matthew DeBord/Insider
I'm not going to show you what the Spyder looks like top up. Some folks might think the roadster looks cool with its sleek semi-automatic cloth roof, complete with winglets that evoke the flimsy covering of the roadster's heritage. But I don't.
The Spyder needs to live a largely top-down life, like its legendary antecedent. You know the car I'm talking about: "Little Bastard." James Dean's deathmobile, No. 130, a 1955 Porsche 550 that lost a tragic open-road encounter with 1950 Ford. Dean was 24. He'd barely had the car a week.
You can't not think about the rebel without a cause — his white V-neck T-shirt, the driving gloves, the cigarette, and that '55 Porsche at a California filling station in the iconic photo, Dean's last known living image — when you slip into the snug cockpit of the 2020 Spyder. Sixty-five years have changed nothing. (Well, airbags.) You're in a topless two-seater with a Porsche badge on the hood, engine behind your head, road beneath your 20-inch alloy wheels.
Matthew DeBord/Insider
What you don't have is a flat-four engine making just over 100 horsepower. In fact, you have a flat-six, sans turbos of any sort, a 4.0-liter mill producing 414 horsepower with 309 pound-feet of torque and — get this, get it good — a redline at 8,000 rpm. (The 2021 911 Carrera S, by contrast, tops out a 7,500, with its 3.0-liter six.)
Yessir! Beneath my left foot was a crisply responsive clutch pedal. Beneath my right hand, a six-speed stick. But I really didn't need anything past three. I'm not sure what anybody is going to do with the forthcoming dual-clutch transmission and its seven. Perhaps shave a few tenths off the Porsche-claimed zero to 60 mph time of 4.2 seconds. (But why? I got to 60 mph in what I thought was about 3.5 seconds, and I was barely into third gear.)
The open air, the open road, the power and the power and the power, and I haven't even gotten to the exhaust note yet. The ever-present sense that the exquisite neutrality of the Spyder's balance could send one off into new adventures in either over- or understeer. The unsettling dynamics of this ... well, this little bastard.
Matthew DeBord/Insider
Heck, I'm a 911 fella through and through. Never have I fallen in line for the Boxsters and Caymans, although I've had my fun with the midmounted turbo fours. I usually like less weight and power, to max out the feathery nature of a proper two-seater.
But the 2020 718 Spyder rearranged my consciousness, like something quick and compelling moving through space and time. This is a car that you dream about after the driving is done, then dream anew when the driving resumes, and before you know it, the driving and dreaming are the same thing.
The 718 Spyder has a stablemate: the GT4, hard-topped and inarguably more the genuine mid-engine race car in the Porsche paddock. For the hardcore competitor, a worthy set of wheels. For me, an extra $3,000, base, on the Spyder and for what? A stiffer architecture? I'd rather channel the late Sir Stirling Moss and have the wind in a grinning swirl around my head.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
See Also:
- Bombardier sold its commercial plane division and will now focus solely on private jets — here's what went wrong
- A 32-year-old mint-condition BMW M3 just sold for $250,000. Here are 15 cars you could buy instead.
- I've driven 7 different Porsches in the past year — and ranked them in order of how much I liked them
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