October Fest
It's October, and the vast majority of tourists have returned to their home-land restoring my beloved Highland playground back to its camper-van and caravan-free state. Bliss......
Just for fun, today I packed the Nikon DSLR, fired up the GTS, and set off across country via the A939 Grantown route to Nethy Bridge and Boat of Garten. Save for a few locals and season savvy tourists the roads were traffic-free, and on this particular occasion, thankfully also roaming-sheep free. On my outward trip on the A939 Grantown road crossing Dava Moor, I came up behind a dawdling Audi S4 Estate car doing 45-50mph. Upon seeing my Porsche in his mirrors the driver for whatever reason, picked up the pace. As many readers will already know, corners are not the Audi's friend, and on this particular section of the A939, glowing brake lights and terminal understeer meant that this Audi and its driver were impeding my natural, and perfectly legal, pace. When a straight section eventually appeared, rather than flashing the left indicator to allow me a safe overtake, the Audi driver floored the accelerator and drew away at grossly illegal speeds. Being generally a law abiding driver, I let him go. A short while later a series of tight "S" bends with adverse cambers and bumpy surfaces meant I caught him up again, only for the same repetition of straight line speed law breaking. What is it about Audi drivers that makes them see red mist (Guards Red?), whenever a Porsche comes up behind? In my many decades of track driving experience the golden rule is if someone catches you up, they are faster than you, so you let them overtake. The same rule applies on the public road. Seemingly some Audi drivers are oblivious to this.
My route from Boat of Garten followed the A938 to Skye of Curr and Duthil, hooking up with the B9007 across the western fringes of Dava Moor heading for home on the Moray Coast. This is a glorious road. Only recently resurfaced, and with frequent Passing Places, it is bowling green smooth and follows the contours of the land in a flowing, keen driver friendly manner, with many long distance sight-line sections where you can line up car for the corners and wallow in the sheer joy of driving. On roads such as this, manual shifting is by far the best choice for maximum driving pleasure. I used Sport/Sport Plus and mainly 4th gear. You don't have to doing illegal speeds to enjoy roads like this. On the long-sighted sections incorporating wonderful flowing bends, 4th gear was spot-on for my GTS PDK. A road speed of 60mph in 4th equated to 3450rpm, slap bang in the middle of the maximum torque band of 2000 - 5000 rpm. This meant the turbo was constantly spooled-up with a decent boost pressure providing an instant throttle response between corners and very rapid progress. I chose to hang on to 4th gear most of the time, dropping to 3rd only occasionally according to the demands of the undulating terrain. I have also driven this same road in my sublime Cayman R manual. It was an interesting comparison today thinking back to driving my CR on the B9007. With the CR manual 4th gear as I recall was a tad too long on this particular route, dropping the revs into the annoying "emissions lag" zone between 2000 and 4000 rpm, whereby the engine "fell off the cams" until the variable cam timing kicked-in at 4000rpm. It was therefore preferable, for maximum driving enjoyment, to engage 3rd gear on the CR. This however, made the driving more frantic as revs were increased by around 1000rpm to around 4400rpm to attain the same rate of progress. This had the downside of alerting any hill-walkers in the vicinity, by greatly increasing the volume and risking being branded as a hooligan driver. The 718 GTS PDK in a similar situation is a much more refined proposition, and rapid progress is quieter to the extent that you could say it is almost unobtrusive. Going by todays experience, Clearly my 718 GTS PDK is by a considerable margin faster across country than my CR ever was. That is 7 years of Porsche R&D progress I guess.
For your interest I have a few photos to follow from my drive-out day. I also post the PCM mpg stats from my drive today. Driving the 718 GTS in the manner described on such roads, the mpg is entirely acceptable. On the same trip my CR manual would have been around the same 23-24mpg figure, bearing in mind the extensive use of 3rd gear rather than 4th on my GTS.
Happy days.
Brian
]
