It is a rule, of thumb I grant, but one to which I very much adhere. When a manufacturer makes a new model range, replete with the requisite mind-boggling number of variants in terms of body configuration, engine size and type, number of driven wheels and so on, it doesn’t just sit down and design several dozen cars side by side. It makes one. A core product, from which all the others are then spun.
Which is why so often the sweet spot in a range can be found not with the fastest, nor most expensive model on offer, but something far more basic. So the rule is that if you can find that car, you’ll have found the best car in the range, because it’s the one on which all the money has been spent, the hub if you like, spiralling out from which are multitudinous spokes leading to the satellite products, all orbiting the mothership.
Take the Porsche 911. As regulars will know, I’m running a base Carrera at present, the only 911 you can now buy for a five-figure sum, and the more time I spend in it, the more convinced of its essential brilliance I become.
Which means, in theory at least, one or possibly both of the cars on your screen right now has a problem. For it seems these are two of the 911 moons that lie furthest away from that core – massively more expensive, highly specialised and, worst by far, limited in number: just 2500 Dakars will be sold to the public, and 1963 S/Ts, the number denoting the year of the 911’s birth, albeit initially as the 901.
