Porsche 911 Turbo S: there’s fast, and then there’s this…

It turns out this ludicrously powerful Porsche is somehow even more impressive on the road than it is when racing jets.

Porsche 911 Turbo S

Look, it’s not that I wasn’t impressed when Porsche shut down a runway at Sydney Airport and let us hit 300km/h in its stupendously fast new 911 Turbo S. I was. Very. Viscerally, even, particularly by the gut punch of copping 1.3gs as we used the car’s Launch Control (push accelerator flat to the floor while holding brake, take foot off brake, scream) to shove us from a standing start to 200km/h in less than nine seconds.

Hitting the triple tonne for the first time in my life, at which point Botany Bay was coming at me at 83m per second, was wolf-howlingly emotional, too. But the fact is, driving very fast in a straight line is not that challenging (race drivers tend to yawn or check their messages down the straights) and, frankly, you’d expect a car that costs almost half a million dollars to have a few more tricks up its vents.

Porsche 911 Turbo S

Which is at least one of the reasons why I implored Porsche to let me take this ludicrously powerful 911 – with its 3.8-litre engine huffing out 478kW and 800Nm – for a longer drive. Happily, they gave me a bright Lava Orange convertible one, which they’d not used on the runway, probably for fear that the wind could scalp someone.

Sure enough, it turns out this Porsche is somehow even more impressive on the road than it is when racing jets. The steering exceeds superlatives, talking to you so mellifluously that it’s like Michael Parkinson is whispering into your hands. Maybe blockbuster action-movie director Michael Bay is talking too, because everything else about the Turbo S is shouty and explosive, most obviously its performance, which is constantly confronting.

Incredibly, my wife rarely swears at me anymore, preferring the eye roll combined with a bored and slightly sad face when I try to impress her by driving like a loon. It has been some years since I’ve seen her genuinely startled by a car’s acceleration, yet this Porsche repeatedly forced her into foul and sacrilegious language (either that or she was frightened by some kind of hole-ridden truck). There’s definitely something about doing 0 to 100km/h in 2.7 seconds that makes your passengers look as if they’ve been stabbed in the chest, Pulp Fiction-style.

As impressive as the pace is, though, it’s the way this Porsche eats bends, and the way it communicates that feeling through your hands and the seat of your pants, that makes it one of the most impressive cars on the planet.

Porsche 911 Turbo S

Which you would want it to be, given that the Cabriolet version starts at $494,500, and the one I was driving costs $523,820 with a few options thrown in. The most notable extras being that Lava Orange paint ($5700), which makes you feel like you’re looking at an eclipse without eye protection, and the Sports Exhaust System ($6470), which gives you a button to make your already loud Porsche sound positively demonic.

For that kind of money, I’d rather have something that doesn’t look a lot like other 911s that can be bought for less than half the price. And while there’s no doubt the Turbo S is a supercar competitor in terms of pace and prowess, it just isn’t the same kind of event motoring you get from a Ferrari.

Nor would I ever consider this convertible version, and not just because the roof in the car we borrowed refused to lower itself on more than one occasion. After some panicked correspondence, a Porsche spokeshead advised me to go out and try again the next day, saying it would probably have fixed itself by then. Now, I’ve always considered the company’s engineering to be impressive, but self-healing seemed like an over-reach. Sure enough, though, it did the trick, and the Porsche people explained that perhaps the roof mechanism had just become a little too hot the day before. Which did make me wonder why anyone who lives in Australia would buy a Cabriolet that doesn’t work if it’s warm outside.

Porsche 911 Turbo S

The roof problem was particularly surprising because this über Porsche proved itself to be such an engineering marvel that day at Sydney Airport, not only launching a large number of journalists towards the ocean at high speed but doing so without overheating, or wearing out the brakes. When flying becomes a thing again, I guess it would always be handy to know that if you were running late you’d have a good chance of catching your flight, even once it’s on the runway.

PORSCHE 911 TURBO S CABRIOLET

ENGINE: 3.8-litre twin turbo (478kW/800Nm). Average fuel 11.7 litres per 100km TRANSMISSION: 8-speed automatic, all-wheel drive

PRICE: From $494,500