'A staggeringly effective and efficient machine, in the best Teutonic tradition': 40 years of the Porsche 959

Porsche's development engineer had no intention of riding shotgun. He explained the extra controls, asked if there were any questions, then slammed the door. Clunk.

Thankfully, I was to drive solo in the world's most complex and expensive road car. The fastest, too. Porsche claims a top speed of 198mph for the twin-turbo, four-wheel-drive 959, yours for £155,000 if you were sufficiently rich and influential to get on the shortlist in the first place. Only 250 959s are to be made, and all were sold long before the first was delivered. To get one now means waiting for the first used samples to hit the market, at about £250,000.

I was at the Nürburgring in Germany, where Porsche had mustered four late-prototype 959s, soon reduced to three by a £20,000 engine-blowing missed-gear error at the hands of a fellow scribe, poor fellow. With good reason, I was wary of the short, crossways travel of the six-speed gear change, though the double-H shift pattern is logical enough, with first in the left-forward position, top in the right-back one.

One twist of the key and the engine exploded into life instantly, with a deep, resonant rumble. The clutch dipped easily, bit fluidly, and the gear lever slotted with less synchro baulking than that of a normal 911, especially when palmed decisively. Steering needed no more than wristy inputs. It was immediately apparent that the 959 called for neither great strength nor unusual skill to drive smoothly. Pushing it to the limit was something else.

Cruising the first few exploratory laps of the tumbling Ring circuit provided an opportunity to gauge the engine's low-rev bite. It did not feel very strong. Porsche make much of its two-stage turbocharging, designed to overcome off-boost lethargy, but here the engine felt comparatively languid below 4,500rpm. It pulled from 1,000rpm in sixth all right, but not with real vigour; not by supercar standards, anyway.

When turbo thrust did cut in, though, acceleration was phenomenal, startling in its ferocity. One blast to the 7,500rpm cut-out was sufficient to make Porsche's claimed performance figures (would you believe 0–60mph in 3.8 seconds?) seem entirely credible. There was no wheelspin, not even the faintest of chirps from the big Dunlop tyres. The first four intermediate maxima were easily confirmed: 37, 64, 93 and 127mph. Over 160mph is attainable in fourth, though not at the Ring, where the fastest straight was good for only 150mph.

It is an awesome combination, 450bhp and four-wheel drive. The 959's 2.85-litre Bosch-injected engine is a horizontally opposed flat-six with air-cooled alloy blocks, water-cooled twin-cam heads and titanium internals to take the strain. Its Herculean power is fed to all four wheels in varying proportions according to black-box instructions through a normal dry-plate clutch, a new six-speed, close-ratio gearbox and two multi-plate torque-splitting units.

There are four switch-selected transmission programmes to choose from, according to road and weather conditions. One, with fixed 50/50 drive, is for grinding through sand and mud. In the other three modes, there is no fixed torque split, but a variable one determined by each wheel's individual needs, according to sensor information fed to the central computer. In theory, it is not as complicated as it sounds.

A static 40/60 weight distribution might momentarily become 20/80 during a hard, dry-road standing start. Torque is distributed in a similar proportion. In the wet, when traction is poorer and weight transfer correspondingly less, the front wheels can handle more torque. They get it. Less traction means more forward drive, though speed influences the split as well. When parking, there is minimal front-wheel drive, to avoid heavy steering. At speed, the front wheels get a bigger share of the drive to give more understeer stability. Clever stuff.

Apart from its amazing transmission, the 959 also has unique anti-lock brakes, directed by the same sensors that control wheelspin. Then there is adjustable damping that automatically lowers and stiffens the car at speed, to improve stability, not to mention constant pressure monitoring of the huge Dunlop Denloc safety tyres through hollow spokes in special alloy wheels.

As a technical tour de force, the 959 is bewilderingly impressive, a harbinger of things to come. As a competition winner, though, this enigmatic blockbuster, surely the final development of the 25-year-old 911, looks like a beaten finalist. Despite victory in the gruelling Paris-Dakar raid, the car is not really suitable for world-championship rallying. Nor is it competitive against purpose-built Group C racing cars, though its recent seventh-place finish at Le Mans was a fine effort. It is as a street-legal supercar, then, as Porsche's flagship and high-tech testbed, that the 959 must finally be judged.

The cabin is much like that of a normal 911, with extra instruments and switchgear. The chunky rotaries for the adjustable Bilstein dampers, controlling both ride height and stiffness, are centrally mounted. Transmission selection is by a column stalk. There is also a torque-split gauge.

I do not doubt that the car would feel sensationally safe and secure at road-going cornering speeds. On the track it seemed tail-heavy (which it is), even a little pendulous. However, it was only when I braked too late for a second-gear corner on the overrun that the tail snapped into oversteer, and then quite controllably. The power steering is sharp but not especially communicative on smooth tarmac. It is through the seat of your pants, firmly clamped by a hip-hugging Recaro seat, that you get the best feel of the car.

There is nothing unusual about the 959's cornering behaviour. It tends to run wide under power and tuck in on the overrun. Not that you would normally ever know, as such traits are only evident at cornering speeds way beyond the limit of ordinary cars. At the Ring, tantalisingly close to some marvellous motoring country, the best cornering technique seemed to be the classical one: slow in, steady through on a constant throttle, then fast out.

It was on the quick, fourth-gear sweeps that the car felt at its stable best. The higher the speed, the stronger the front-drive understeering influence, remember. Aerodynamics play their part, too. Porsche could have lowered the drag coefficient below 0.31, but only by sacrificing impeccable stability.

With more front-drive bias, in the 'wet' or 'snow' transmission programmes, the car felt twitchier, more sensitive to the throttle on the Ring's dry track. Quite how all this staggering complexity would show up on public roads, particularly on wet ones, I am not sure.

I was left with the impression that the 959 was a staggeringly effective and efficient machine, in the best Teutonic tradition, but somehow lacking in character and soul. For stirring indolent red corpuscles, the rival Ferrari 288 GTO excited me a lot more.

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