It’s been said so often I’m sick of it. Sick, particularly, because in no small part it’s been me who’s been saying it. But today it’s kind of hard to avoid because it is the entire reason a white Porsche 911 Carrera has just turned up, here to stay for the next few months. Because when it comes to 911s, and haven’t we all been told this a million zillion times – here it comes: ‘less is more’.
What Porsche bores (myself included) usually mean by this is that the essential 911 proposition is so fundamentally right that the moment you try to enhance or upgrade it in any particular way, like by adding more power, four-wheel drive or a Targa or convertible roof, you actually end up taking away something far more important: the purity of the 911 driving experience. And if you’re the proud owner of a convertible Carrera 4S thinking this is all so much arrant bollocks, then I don’t blame you at all: you’re almost certainly not a Porsche bore, and clearly all the better for it.
But as someone who is so afflicted, I was curious. Curious not to see how far you had to go – or how much you had to add – before the law of less is more became palpably obvious, but to go in completely the other direction instead. Because there is a theory that says no principle is indefinitely extendable in either direction. Which rather begged the question: does there come a point where a 911 is so stripped back that less actually becomes, well, less?
