Porsche 718 Spyder Mountain Test: Purist Sports Car In The Age Of Robots

In 718 Spyder, Porsche’s Motorsport toy shop has reimagined the Golden Era sports car experience while delivering the reliability, comfort and engineering integrity we expect in the 21st Century. Emphasizing the ancient sports car arts, 718 Spyder is so extraordinarily good, so inspirational that a few days after a drive in the dark blue Spyder you see here, a friend headed to a Porsche dealer to buy a foggy grey Cayman GT4, the Spyder’s hardtop fraternal twin. Check in hand, a mature man of brilliant talent and measured sensibilities ran to the dealer like a schoolboy on the first day of summer break.

PlayStation thumb controls do not clutter the steering wheel or center console: powertrain calibration is limited to one, not a menu of 3+1 as found on most supercars, hypercars, super sedans and sport compact cars.

The more-revs-equals-more-power shrieking delivery of Spyder’s 4-liter 414-horsepower flat-6 will be familiar to men of a certain age who grew up with the narrowly linear engines of the 1950s and ‘60s. Without the vast and boosty bubble of torque turbocharged Porsches possess, Spyder demands that when you drive, DRIVE—hang up the phone.

Proper exploitation of the engine can be explained with a golfing metaphor. Turbo engines with maximum torque over a span of 4000 rpm are like a Big Bertha titanium driver with a sweet spot the size of a baseball. 718 Spyder’s naturally aspirated engine is like a Persimmon wood that Bobby Jones or Arnold Palmer might have used, demanding surgical precision, discipline and style, with limited tolerance for the lackadaisical.

For its first year, Spyder is offered exclusively with that most delightful of anachronisms, a manual 6-speed gearbox. Row the gearbox with skill to keep the engine near the torque peak between 5000 to 6800 rpm, and you’ll feel like the leading man in a 1960s French Art House film heading for a romantic assignation. Porsche is among the few car companies investing significant capital improving manual gearboxes, all for that 15-20 percent of its U.S. buyers who prefer doing things the old way.

Porsche’s dual-clutch Doppelkupplung (PDK) semi-auto gearbox will be available for order soon, cars arriving in early 2021. PDK will adapt Spyder to daily life in my native Los Angeles, but also diminish its magical allure. Porsche expects the PDK will account for 50 percent of sales. PDK will shave several tenths off the Spyder’s 4.2-second 0-60 time, with cold-blooded efficiency, significantly expanding its urban street racing capability. The days when a manual gearbox is best for acceleration or daily life are long, long gone. But the PDK cars will merely be the fastest of the 718/Boxster family, not an experience unlike any other.

Folks like me who can readily access lonely two-lanes should opt for the challenge of a manual gearbox. Springing in shifter and clutch are stout, so no wimps allowed. For track work and more importantly swift pleasure trips and mountain forays, the gearbox is well done.

First gear sets the car in motion. The tallish second gear plus 3, 4 and even 5 are for rowing with style at speeds from 25 to well over triple digits. Throws are short and positive, most satisfying considering the gearbox is a few feet to the rear and not right under the elbow.

For older enthusiasts, a manual gearbox is a trip down muscle memory lane. I killed the engine once, reversing into a tricky position on a steep mountain overlook. Keep the clutch pedal depressed and the powertrain’s Start-Stop computer scripting will re-fire the engine within a second or so. In traffic, Start-Stop is annoying, developed to boost EPA mileage ratings, but Porsche has taught it a new trick that brings genuine benefit. The clutch pedal is fabulous on the hunt, but in first and reverse, maneuvering at low speeds, it’s heavy. My friend who bought the GT4 killed the engine a half-dozen times before getting the hang of it.

Porsche is no longer a niche car company, producing a few variants of one car, but these Stuttgarters massage the blend line between product planning, engineering and marketing as skillfully as any in the auto industry, with clear understanding of the sliver-thin layers of current and potential owners. Acknowledging that neophyte younger buyers and greybeard Boomers who haven’t worked a manual gearbox in a while might need help, Porsche has adopted a measure of long-proven robotics that will ease the first few months of ownership: Auto-Blip.

Engaged with a button on the center console, Auto-Blip is a robotic form of heel-and-toe downshifting, the engine/gearbox computers perfectly matching engine revs when moving from a higher to a lower gear, delivering shock-free shifts. It means your right foot doesn’t need to work throttle and brake at the same time. It leads to a philosophical debate best answered in the Tao of “Two and a Half Men.” Regarding the use of Viagra, Charlie Sheen’s character stated in an early season, “Viagra? That’s like corkin’ the bat.“ Yet Auto-Blip Viagra allows the neophyte or rusty enthusiast to be as smoothly skilled as a professional racecar driver of 25 year ago, when we still had manual gearboxes in premiere racing series.

Hierarchies exist in nature and in the realm of purist performance cars, those 2-seat cars with limited utility beyond the pleasurable physics of fast travel. We have eccentric frivolities, sports cars, supercars, and hypercars. Porsche’s 718 Spyder is without question the top seed on the sports car evolutionary scale. In the 718 Spyder, Porsche engineers have achieved unquestionable excellence, the car shorn of most robotic intervention, demanding the driver step up to the challenge and become a better driver. 718 Spyder brings intimate connection to both physics and the fading art of sports car driving. 718 Spyder is a purist sports car dream.