Ready, aim, fire with Porsche’s 427kW 911 Turbo rocketship

The Playmate iGenie is one of the fastest tennis ball firing machines you can buy. Wick it up to 11 and it’ll launch from its 300-ball capacity hopper at over 160km/h, at a rate of one every second.

Now I’ve never stood in front of one of these machines to experience the result, but driving the Eildon-Jamieson road in a Porsche 911 Turbo can’t be too different.

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The tightly packed bends explode through the windscreen without pause as your brain struggles to process the almost ridiculous overstimulation.

Perhaps we should have chosen a road a little more sedate. But the 911 Turbo has a number of questions to answer, chief among them whether it has made good on Porsche’s promise that this latest 992 generation has got its bite back.

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Where previous water-cooled 911 Turbos have gradually morphed into a more GT car role, leaving the GT2 and GT3 models to be honed to a keen edge, perhaps Zuffenhausen felt that the Turbo had become a little too middle-aged, maybe a little too self-satisfied, operating within an admittedly heady comfort zone. Cue the 992.

Now the astute among you will have noticed that this model is the 427kW/750Nm Turbo and not the 478kW/800Nm Turbo S flagship. You’ll save around $75K plumping for the non-S variant, with this car reaching 100km/h in a claimed 2.8s rather than 2.7s of the 911 Turbo S.

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In other words, they’re both so quick that your brain will be too scrambled to notice any great difference in relative ferocity.

We ask whether the 992 Turbo, at a list price of $405,000 before options and taxes still does enough to justify itself in Porsche’s new world where every 911 that doesn’t wear a GT3 badge is now a turbo.

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It’s a valid question, as we’ve driven the 911 Carrera and Carrera S models fairly extensively and couldn’t really ask for much more from a road car.

Does the 992 Turbo need to be fierce or should it have leant further into its GT role? What is its place in the new 911 firmament and does it stand up one its own merits here in Australia?

There’s a lot to unpack here. Dive into the video as we run you through what has to be one of the fastest point-to-point cars that money can buy.