We concluded Autocar's road test of the dazzling new Porsche Cayman S with the following somewhat understated sentence: “The Cayman deserves a space in the Porsche model range, and on the wish list of anyone with $80,000 to spend.
But what we didn’t say, not in categorical black and white terms, is that it is the best driver’s car 80 grand can buy you, amen. Why not? Because we needed to compare it with the cars you see here before making our final conclusions.
And so to battle, or, to be more precise, to the airfield circuit at Bruntingthorpe, England, for part one of our quest to find out how good the Cayman S really is. As you may have already noticed, it’s something of a German manufacturer-fest, this one. In the red corner is the massively improved new performance icon from Audi, the V8-powered RS4. This offering comes with 414hp, 317lb ft of torque, four doors and the biggest trunk of this group, not to mention the sexiest interior of just about any car you care to think of this side of a Bugatti Veyron.
Mercedes is represented here by the hilariously muscular SLK AMG. Why so funny? If the cartoon bodykit and eye-watering $105,000 price-as-tested don’t make you smirk, the fact that there’s a 5.4-liter V8 with 360hp and 375lb ft under the hood will surely raise a grin. Even more so once you consider that at 3,400 lbs, the SLK is lighter than the Audi by the same amount it is heavier than the Porsche, which boasts just 295hp.
Finally, and perhaps hardest of all to crack as far as the Cayman is concerned, is the BMW M3 Club Sport. The M3 needs little introduction save to mention that in Club Sport guise it gets most of the features that made the CSL great (steering system, M-traction control system) and none of the bits that made it annoying (paddle shift gearbox, silly tires, even sillier price). It has 338hp and 269lb ft of torque, weighs 3,475 lbs and will clearly take some beating – by both the Cayman and BMW itself when the all-new V8-engined M3 appears later this year.
Just in case you’ve missed what the Cayman S is all about, and for some reason can’t guess from which car it is derived by looking at its bodyshell, it’s effectively a tin-top and therefore much stiffer version of the Boxster – not a 911 that’s been carved up. It uses a mildly tuned Boxster S engine and gearbox with a unique set of gear ratios. The Cayman weighs just 2,954 lbs, its engine develops 295hp and 251lb ft of torque, and the car has entirely unique steering and suspension settings. However, chuck in the test car’s adaptive dampers, full leather cabin, 19-in. wheels and a communications pack, and the price jumps to the point that the Mercedes doesn’t look so expensive and the M3 CS appears something of a bargain.
The Cayman could be the best car Porsche has ever made, Sutcliffe reckons.
Day one: on the track
Seeing the four of them together for the first time, nose to nose at the end of our two-mile runway, the differences between them are nothing if not obvious. The RS4 looks like a DTM car that’s been legalized for the road, the M3 looks, well, like an M3 wearing sparkling new 19-in. wheels. Maybe it’s us, but there’s something slightly vulgar about the way the SLK appears to mug the tarmac, even when it’s standing still. But it’s the Porsche that everyone just gawps at.
It really is a pretty car, the Cayman, in the way that a Ferrari Dino is pretty. It couldn’t be more different to the Mercedes in the method that it captures your attention. Even in garish canary yellow it wins round one with such ease we wonder whether it’s worth going any further with this comparison. Game over, Porsche wins, the end.…
Not quite. Day one is about pure dynamics; about how fast they are against the clock, both in a straight line and around a circuit. And although the Cayman S enters any such contest with an impressive set of credentials to call upon, all of the others, in theory, are bigger hitters. Even so, from the moment you climb aboard and turn the key you just know the Cayman is not going to get whipped by any car, on any track, or in any acceleration test.
True, it doesn’t have quite the same thunder of the SLK under full acceleration, nor the top-end clarity of the M3 or RS4 over the final 2000 rpm, but it’s quick, the Cayman, make no mistake about that. And it sounds good, too.
Most of all, though, it handles. Boy does the Cayman handle. Although this is very much a power circuit featuring huge long straights and not many twists, there are sufficient corners, including a great section of S-bends, to allow the chassis to shine. And for the first three or four laps I’m flat stunned by how beautifully it goes around corners.
It has so much balance mid-corner, you can play with the throttle to tune your line not by feet or inches but by single coats of yellow paint. The way it steers, so accurately yet with so much feel and fluidity, makes a contemporary 911 seem like a luxury sedan and a Mercedes SLK feel like a boat. And the way it stops… well it’s a Porsche, except even by Weissach’s unrivaled standards the Cayman stands out; and once again it’s the level of feel through the pedal that makes it so good.
As a result, you can’t help but get carried away by the Cayman when you drive it quickly, so rich is the seam of communication between you, its controls and the ground beneath. The link is so strong between man and machine it’s easy to emerge after a few laps wondering how, exactly, anything is ever going to get much better than that?
From a pure feel point of view, it isn’t. And it doesn’t, not even in the M3 which, in CS guise, really is quite some car to drive. It doesn’t have anything like the mechanical feel of the Porsche, but what the BMW does have is great balance on turn-in, huge grip mid-corner and a fair bit more poke down the straights, of which there are three big ones at Bruntingthorpe. Result? With a bit of manhandling the M3 laps even quicker than the Porsche (nope, I couldn’t believe the data, either, even though I generated it) and just for good measure beats it by half a second in the 0-100mph contest as well (11.5sec vs. 12.0sec).
We left the Audi and Mercedes until last on the drag strip because we expected them to blitz the other two, as they benefit from extra horsepower. And so it proved in the acceleration test.
With no wheelspin whatsoever and its 7-speed automatic gearbox picking gears off seemingly faster than you could count them, the SLK bludgeoned its way to 60mph and 100mph in 4.7sec and 10.6sec. It’s so rapid in a straight line, the SLK, you feel like you should hold on to your hair under full acceleration, just in case the g-forces rip your scalp off.
But the Audi is fractionally faster still. Having chirruped its tires only slightly and no doubt sent a heinous amount of strain through its drivetrain, the four wheel-drive RS4 rocketed to 60mph and 100mph in 4.5sec and 10.5sec, demolishing all its opposition in the process.
No question about it, the RS4 is a fabulously quick car featuring one of the great V8 engines of our time and, at last, a suitably slick 6-speed manual gearbox to go with it. The real surprise with the RS4, however, is how well it competed around the track. Yes, it understeered more than the Porsche and, no, it didn’t have the ultimate composure of the BMW in the quick corners. But neither did the RS4 run out of ideas like we expected it to going on past form. The truth is the Audi was fast, fun to drive, sounded fantastic and went well against the clock. Yes, it was outperformed by the Cayman and BMW on lap time, but the difference was marginal.
Audi continues company's run of beautifully appointed interiors.
Which is rather more than could be said for the SLK. The Mercedes was massively fast down the straights and, thanks to its performance pack which includes bigger wheels and brakes, slowed well enough for the corners – after a fashion.
However, once committed to a corner the SLK was nowhere beside the others, with neither the grip nor the ability to alter its line mid-corner. And its traction control system was something else, unable to make its mind up whether to remove the throttle entirely on some corners or provide enough slip to allow a full blown spin on others. It was, relatively speaking, a shambles compared with the others.
Day two: on the road
It got worse for the SLK on the second day of our test. OK, it was wet for much of our time on the road routes, which doesn’t help when there are only two driven wheels and 375lb ft to deploy, but the Mercedes’ foibles went well beyond poor traction. Over 200 miles it used more fuel than the other cars tested here, had the least comfortable ride and least satisfying steering. Also, in many ways it felt the least expensive inside despite wearing the highest price tag, and was universally considered to be the car all six testers least wanted to drive. Or look at. Or be seen looking at.
On the plus side it has great seats, one of the best folding metal roofs in the history of the car, an incredible engine and, on a straight, flat stretch of road, sufficient acceleration to make the Cayman feel like a Toyota Prius (sort of). But that’s still not enough to save it in this instance. Against cars of this quality and on these roads the SLK AMG feels like an imposter – and not a very good one at that.
The RS4, on the other hand, got better and better the farther we drove it, having already acquitted itself well on the track. For some while now Audi has been threatening to make a great driver’s car, and for some while now it has failed to deliver. Not anymore. The new RS4 is everything its predecessor wasn’t, and it doesn’t take long to realize why on UK roads. It rides properly, steers sweetly, handles with real flair and has a level of sensitivity to its controls that has, by and large, eluded previous incarnations of this model. That’s the real news.
But when taken in conjunction with all the other strengths we’ve come to associate with Audis in recent years (near-perfect build quality, to-die-for good looks both inside and out, strong resale value) the RS4 then becomes quite a package. Good to own, good to look at, good to sit inside and now good to drive as well. With a trunk big enough to take four times the luggage you can squeeze into the Cayman and a cabin that can swallow three times the number of passengers, you begin to wonder why anyone with the right amount of money would ever want any other car.
You can't go wrong with any of these, but the yellow Porsche wowed staffers most.
And then you drive the Cayman S along an empty winding road. With a BMW M3 CS dancing around in your mirrors. And an RS4 trying hard but failing, just, to keep up.
The differences, in the end, between the good and the great are pretty small but they’re obvious enough to distance the Cayman and M3 from the Audi, if only at a level sufficiently deep that most drivers, most of the time, simply wouldn’t notice. But a difference there is nevertheless, particularly in the way they steer.
Separating the BMW and Porsche, on the other hand, almost comes down to semantics. Almost, but not quite.
After 200 miles on the road and countless laps of the track, what it comes down to is one thing – feel. The Merc has hardly any, the Audi has more than we expected, the BMW has lots and the Porsche has half as much again. Right now it’s hard to think of any car that connects more clearly with an eager driver than the Cayman S – and that includes hardcore specials like the Lotus Exige S.
Yet at the same time the Porsche is refined enough to drive on a freeway for hours, is astonishingly well made and looks sensational. It also uses less gas than its rivals – 18.9mpg on this test compared to 17.9 for the BMW, 17.3 for the Audi and 13.9 for the Mercedes – and will almost certainly hold more of its value over the next five years.
The Club Sport might be the best M3 there has ever been, which makes it one heck of a good car by any reckoning, but even it can’t live with the Cayman overall.
If you need the extra space then buy the BMW or the Audi, because both of these models are right at the top of their games. But if you want the best car of this bunch, then go for the Cayman. It could be the best car Porsche has ever made.
-Steve Sutcliffe/Autocar
Full article can be found here = http://www.speedtv.com/articles/automot ... els/22346/
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