From the June 2016 issue
A YouTube video that made the rounds purports to depict a streetcar ride down San Francisco’s Market Street just four days before the calamitous 1906 earthquake that destroyed much of the city. If not filmed then, exactly, the reel was definitely shot in an age when horses still provided much of the motive power in cities. Where have all the horses gone? To dude ranches and racing stables and country paddocks, where they now serve primarily as objects of sport and leisure, a change that is presumably more fun for them as well as for their owners.
There’s no question that an earthquake is coming to our world. The internal-combustion engine, the old nag that has served us so long, is at the precipice, and one of the early tremors indicating the greater seismic disruption to come is the increasing ubiquity of the turbocharger. It’s not a new technology, but it is being embraced and refined to an ever-widening degree to allow engine shrinkage without power sacrifice.
In the higher reaches of the performance market, where the horses are already pretty much exercised strictly for pleasure, turbos have invaded. They are here not to offset shrinkage alone, but to also push up power outputs to levels formerly seen only in racing. Take our sherbet-orange McLaren 570S as an example. The 3.8-liter twin-turbo V-8 of the new “entry-level” McLaren, base price of $187,400, makes 562 horsepower, enough to win Le Mans outright once upon a time. McLaren pulls 666 horsepower from this exact same displacement in the pricier 675LT, and the company’s hearty embrace of compressors surely scared Ferrari into adopting turbos for its own V-8s, lest it become the brand of poverty power.
Standing as something of a rock against the encroaching tide is the Porsche 911 GT3 RS. Its 4.0-liter flat-six inhales exactly what a planet with an iron core big enough to give compressive weight to ethereal gas molecules can give it. Which is adequate enough to allow the Porsche to make 500 horsepower. That may not sound like much in these silly days, what with a 1500-hp Bugatti on the auto-show circuit, but it is a lot from a six-pot engine with no induction help.
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With its turbo muscle, the 570S felt quicker off the corners. It wasn’t. The always-alert RS was. |
Not a direct competitor to the mid-engined McLaren, which is an extravagant peacock of a machine with a transparent engine cover and batwing doors slashed with black carbon-fiber lances, the GT3 RS is a peculiar vehicle with a specific task. Carrying a base price of $177,950, it is optimized for the track and is the closest thing you can get to a Porsche Cup car with a license plate. Or, in this case, a license plate plus carbon-ceramic brakes ($9210), a front-axle lift system ($3490), leather upholstery ($3480), Lava Orange paint ($3140), and some other plums off the rich Porsche option tree that raise the price to $204,160.
The McLaren is optioned as well, to $218,030, including carbon-ceramic brake rotors, a luxury pack with power seats and a 12-speaker Bowers & Wilkins stereo, and the aforementioned sherbet paint, its $4150 price buying a couple of grated BMWs’ worth of metal flake.
At this level of jousting purebreds, is natural aspiration still relevant or are turbos now necessary to make us hyperventilate? We took to the roads in the cheapest McLaren and one of the most expensive 911s, and also enlisted central California’s Buttonwillow Raceway Park to reach an answer. It was a very tough call.
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