What's it like to drive?

While it would be both disingenuous of me and unfair on the car to give a full review based solely on an hour's drive from the airport to the hotel in Tenerife, I know that everyone is hungry for information, so I thought I would post some initial impressions now and then some fuller conclusions tomorrow after I've spent a whole day behind the wheel. 

So, the car we have is a standard Carrera S without any PDCC or rear-wheel steering and... it feels pretty bloody fantastic. There is real feel though the steering, the wheel bubbling with background chatter even on the motorway without any lock applied. Up on the island's equivalent of a B-road the steering weights up beautifully in your hands as you load up the suspension in corners and it really encourages you to push the car. This is a massive change from how the electric steering behaved in the first generation 991 when it was launched.

The chassis reacts as a 911 should - in other words it feels like a rear-engined car, flowing through corners, shifting subtly from turn-in to exit and making the most of the weight balance. The extra torque of the engine really helps to push it through the final phase of a corner too, working the formidable traction to its limit, getting the car to squat and drive beautifully out of bends. As for the new 3.0-litre flat-six, you can certainly tell that the engine is turbocharged in its delivery, but the throttle response is very good and even with a standard exhaust the sound is much closer to an old naturally aspirated Carrera than it is to the gas rush of a Turbo.

The engine continued to impress during our full day on Tenerife. It certainly sounds softer low down, but it is still a pleasing, distinctively flat-six sound. The most gratifying thing however is the way the 3.0-litre engine revs. In a 911 Turbo (the full-fat four-wheel drive monster) you get a lot of gas rush and the limiter not only seems to arrive quite early, but it is also quite hard to distinguish aurally where it is. With the 991.2, the engine has a real crescendo to it, revving sweetly all the way to the far side of 7500rpm and never letting up in its power delivery. In short, while you can surf along on the low-down torque you are also rewarded for chasing the red line.

The overall grip of the car is staggering. It's also quite deceptive. As I said in my initial impressions, at sane speeds the car feels very much like a 911 should and with the dampers in their normal (softer) setting there is a delightful amount of weight transition and body roll. This leads you to expect that the car might slide quite easily, but certainly on the dry, super grippy tarmac of the r oads around the volcano, the 991.2 would just cling on and cling on. Getting hard on the throttle early in the corner the car would feel like it was about to relinquish grip before digging deep with its rear tyres, finding extra reserves and just firing you out of the bend. It was both deeply impressive and a touch disappointing at the same time. I found the car would indulge in small but enjoyable slides that almost didn't require any corrective lock but it will be interesting to get it onto a track (with a bit more space and less traffic!) and see how it behaves when the limit is conclusively breached.

As ever, the 911 is a hard car to find a rival for particularly now that the Audi R8 is V10 only and therefore much more expensive. Perhaps the most obvious rival is Jaguar's F-Type Coupe. A Nissan GT-R is also comparable on price and while in the past we would have said it was in a different performance league we suspect that a Carrera S with all the bells and whistles might now run it rather close. We will be getting a 991.2 together with its rivals very soon (look out for the test in the magazine) so we'll reserve judgement until then.