On this episode of Ignition
Category
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MotorTranscript
00:00 Grand Touring. To me, it's one of the more romantic things you can do with a car.
00:07 An equal blend of luxury, speed, and distance. Of leather, and power, and land.
00:14 Where you're going isn't quite as important as what you're driving. Though, it matters.
00:19 If I shut my eyes and dream, I see a Ferrari 275 GTB from London to Nice.
00:25 A Porsche 928 from Berlin to Stockholm. A V12 Jag from Paris to Budapest.
00:32 Classic cars through exotic locales. And all in Europe.
00:37 But you know what? We've got a pretty great continent of our own.
00:41 One that I love driving across every chance I get.
00:45 Which is why, when the opportunity to pilot a Porsche 911 Turbo coast-to-coast presented itself, I jumped at the chance.
00:52 Who wouldn't want to turbo across America?
00:56 We picked up the Turbo S at the Atlanta airport. Leather? An acre of it.
01:13 Power? Almost too much. 560 horsepower and 516 pound-feet of torque. With 553 pound-feet of twist available for short bursts of time.
01:26 I should mention price, too, because this particular 911 comes in at $199,065.
01:36 A silly amount of money, for sure. Though, for a Porsche not that heavily optioned, base price is $181,000.
01:45 As for destinations, my first was Birmingham, Alabama, and the mind-boggling Barber Motorsports Park, where I ran into a friend of mine.
02:00 Here I am, on the first stop of the coast-to-coast Porsche 911 Turbo S Drive. Happened to run into my good friend Randy Popes at the Barber Motorsports Museum.
02:09 Hiya, Johnny. I'm a bike guy.
02:12 So we're gonna go check out their collection. Come on.
02:14 For me, looking at motorbikes is fun, but it pales in comparison to driving a fast car on a racetrack.
02:28 One more point. If you ever get a chance to get coached up by a pro, take it.
02:33 I love the pushback. You can feel the power pushing you back into the seat.
02:40 Absolutely. Yeah, there's just so much power in this thing. I mean, I'm glad we're taking it to a track.
02:45 I mean, you know, technically, like, you know, the GT3 is the track car. This is your cross-continental kind of touring car, but it's quick.
02:55 It's really quick.
02:58 The problem is that we gotta, you know, drive this car here now, and then these tires have to make it all the way to Los Angeles.
03:06 And we're gonna be visiting a road in Arkansas that my friend of mine, Nelson, claims is the greatest road in America.
03:14 I wanna go.
03:15 Ten times better than Tale of the Dragon, according to him.
03:18 That's not possible.
03:19 Well, we shall see. I looked at a map. It's ten times longer.
03:22 Oh, that's ten times better.
03:25 I don't know. So we'll see.
03:28 Stupid polar vortex. It took most of my skill to keep the car from going straight at just 45 miles per hour.
03:48 It was time to change plans, and quick.
03:52 This is one of the beauty parts of a road trip, when compared to other forms of travel,
03:56 you can literally just turn the wheel and wind up somewhere completely unexpected, like the grand city of New Orleans.
04:03 Almost as good was driving through the beautiful Louisiana countryside along the mighty Mississippi River.
04:16 The less said about what we did that evening in New Orleans, the better, from a legal point of view.
04:21 And, while New Orleans may not be a great car city, it's one of my absolute favorites.
04:27 If you haven't been, please go.
04:29 Sadly, we had just one night in the Big Easy, because we had to be in Houston, Texas the next afternoon
04:35 to meet another friend of mine, horsepower king and legendary tuner, John Hennessey.
04:41 The plan never evolved much past run the Turbo S on the drag strip behind his shop, and that was fine with me.
04:49 Well, I made it from New Orleans, Louisiana, to just west of Houston, Texas, to Hennessey Performance Engineering.
05:03 So not only do I get to play with a 560 horsepower Porsche, I got a 750 horsepower Cadillac.
05:10 And now, me and my friend John Hennessey are literally going to go screw around on a drag strip.
05:15 Right, well John, good to be in Texas.
05:24 Hey Johnny.
05:25 Great to see you.
05:26 Welcome to Texas.
05:27 It's always good to be here.
05:28 It's always good to have a quarter mile drag strip at your beck and call when you're in Texas.
05:31 It's pretty cool just having your backyard like this.
05:33 Absolutely.
05:34 Alright, so, 911 Turbo S, 560 horsepower, 553 pound feet of torque.
05:41 We'll drive, tiptronic transmission.
05:43 I'm sorry, not the tip, PDK, excuse me.
05:45 Dual clutch.
05:46 I think the air conditioning's on.
05:47 I'm just going to kind of put my foot on the...
05:50 We're just going to roll up and we're going to go in stage.
05:52 Okay, so just going to go and kind of put it in drive and just kind of cruise up a little bit more.
05:57 Stop.
05:58 Okay, and then we can just go whenever the countdown comes and you're ready to go.
06:02 [Music]
06:06 Impressive.
06:07 She's got some nuts.
06:09 Wow.
06:10 We just broke the camera mount.
06:13 [Laughter]
06:15 Oh my God.
06:16 Who cares?
06:17 Keep going.
06:18 [Laughter]
06:20 Here we go.
06:22 [Music]
06:25 [Tires screeching]
06:28 [Music]
06:54 Wow.
06:55 Yeah, it gets up and goes pretty good.
06:56 So, yeah, it doesn't have the initial launch, but that pull you're talking about.
07:00 Yeah, once you get going, it's definitely...
07:01 Like right about 60, 70 miles an hour, suddenly you're just...
07:04 There's like a second hand pushing you back into the seat.
07:06 Right.
07:07 I mean, I got into the throttle pretty aggressive while I was still in first.
07:10 [Tires screeching]
07:12 The results were eye-opening.
07:13 The Porsche able to do the quarter mile in 11.2 seconds, whereas the Cadillac,
07:18 which by the way is an automatic and only has rear-wheel drive, did it in 11.4.
07:24 Now, both cars' launches were hampered by the fact that there were two big dudes
07:28 just kind of goofing around.
07:30 However, when we got the Porsche back to our testing crew in California,
07:33 it was able to run the quarter mile in 10.9 seconds.
07:37 [Music]
07:45 After Houston, we slept in San Antonio, enjoyed breakfast on that city's gorgeous
07:49 riverwalk, and then decided to jam home to Los Angeles as quickly as possible.
07:55 An easy thing to do when you're driving a car that goes 60 miles an hour in 2.6 seconds
08:00 and can hit 150 miles an hour in the blink of an eye.
08:04 [Music]
08:07 I set out to verify two things about this country, and I failed at both.
08:11 I got snowed out of driving what my pal Nelson claims is the best road in America.
08:16 I also never got the chance to taste what my friends Dave and Holly claim is the
08:21 best steak in the country.
08:23 [Music]
08:52 Good boy. Oh, oh, oh.
08:57 I moved my hand.
08:59 Should I talk?
09:00 Yeah.
09:01 Okay.
09:02 Well, I'm here in Van Horn, Texas, making friends.
09:06 Sadly, the Cattle Company restaurant here, which my friends Dave and Holly claim is
09:11 the best steak in America, is closed.
09:14 Now, Dave did say, "Hey, make sure you get there not on a Sunday because they're closed Sundays."
09:18 So here we are on Monday, 4 p.m., and they're not open.
09:22 Here you go, boy.
09:24 But that's the thing about a road trip.
09:26 You have all the freedom in the world, but nobody else gives a damn about your schedule.
09:31 Anyways, I'm starving, so we're going to go eat somewhere else.
09:35 Come on, boy.
09:36 [Music]
09:38 But I did get to take three newbies out for a night in New Orleans and eat some
09:43 incredible Mexican food in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
09:46 [Music]
09:53 As is always the case with road trips, it's not the destination that matters.
09:57 It's the journey, all 3,186 miles of it.
10:02 Nearly as important, that road in Arkansas and that steak in Texas are still there,
10:08 just waiting for me to come back.
10:10 [Music]
10:13 Now, look at the car.
10:14 The 911 Turbo S, yes, yes, it's expensive.
10:17 But I mean, think about this thing.
10:19 It went to a drag strip and beat a 750-horsepower Cadillac driven by John Hennessey himself.
10:25 And it has comfortably and quietly cruised 3,147 miles so far all the way across the country.
10:34 Relatively comfortable.
10:36 I just checked the oil level. Oil's still good.
10:39 Besides a bigger back seat, what more do you want?
10:43 An incredible, incredible machine.
10:46 Plus, and I can say this from experience, if you ever need to go from about 80 miles an hour
10:51 to 160 by the time you can count to three, this is your car.
10:56 [Music]
10:59 [Music]