924Board.org

[924guy]

I stumbled(crashed ) into a local dealer "test drive" autox the other day. purely a sales pitch event, I saw a bunch of 911's and caymans running a course in a parking lot and thought i missed the club event memo, so went over to see what was going on...

The Cayman S was tearing up the coarse, they didn't have a timing station, but it was on average 3-5 seconds faster than the 911 across the board. Reminded me very much of a well set up 924, but with allot more low end... a 911 4s did pretty well also, but still not as quick on the tight course as id of thought. they do have the grunt though..

There were about a dozen people there, plus another 5 or so salesmen, there may have been more earlier, but not a big turnout considering they had a good 15 brand new Porsches there. I got some odd looks when talking to a few of the attendee's and I mentioned that i was "into" 924's and 931's, mostly from the sales crew. I don't think the salesmen appreciated the conversation I was having with one of the guys there about appreciating the old school idealisms of "if it doesn't make it faster, it shouldn't be in the car" or my appreciation of the 924/944/968 series and what a bargain I thought they were, when the question was asked of me. understandable I guess since they were there to sell cars at 60k plus a pop, and using the luxury and status angels as sales tools..

They did have a new Cayenne GTS , and i must admit, it was much more attractive to me than the normal or turbo examples, but it was an auto unfortunately (I really wanted to see the new manual model after reading a bit about it..) But the part that made me a bit sick to my stomach was when half the crowd literally ran over to it to see the new automatic rear hatch opener at work.. ugh...
Pretty pathetic when the thing that excites people the most is the hatch motor... not the auto lowering suspension, huge brakes, impressive hp, handling package, dual wing spoiler, performance specs....a freekin hatch motor.. thats when i left...
It was interesting to be able to build a profile of sort of porsche's "new" customers, and a little scary.. but at least there were a couple of people there that were still truly more interested in performance than automatic hatch openers, so all may not be lost just yet....
_________________
Eric
78 924
82 931 SE "smokey"
99' VehiCross
Y2K Honda Insight
http://www.cardomain.com/id/924Guy
Performance by Pasha