Have you ever peeked through the window of a sports car to see what transmission it has? Did you scoff and silently judge the owner for saddling his or her sports car with an automatic? We’ve done that, too. But if you spot a new 911 Turbo on the street, don’t bother peering through the glass; this one only comes with a dual-clutch automatic.
Before you get indignant and throw this magazine at the kid who keeps snapping his gum in the waiting room, you should know that the automatic in the Turbo S is a bright spot in an extraordinary car. Its launch-control function is what puts the Turbo S in the company of the quickest production cars ever built. Launch control isn’t new, but in the Turbo S it makes the most of the car’s 560 horsepower. It gets this 3588-pound machine to 60 mph in 2.6 seconds. That’s just a tenth more than we got when we tested the Bugatti Veyron, and the Turbo S can even put a tenth-of-a-second whupping on a Bug to 30 mph. You can’t fall off a building that fast. At 30 mph, the twin-turbo 3.8-liter flat-six pancakes you into the sport seat with up to 1.37 g’s of acceleration. A run to 100 mph takes 6.5 seconds, only 0.2 second off a McLaren F1’s pace.
would stab a bitch for one
