Why the Porsche 911 Dakar is Still a Great Canyon Car - TheSmokingTire

Rally. Rally. Rally. Rally. You can rely on us. Rally. Rally. Rally faithful. Hey y'all, welcome to the road. This is the road drive of the 911 Dakar. Zach's not had a go yet, so better a year late than never. Yeah, this is the same as the sand dunes. Right. This is equal, thank you. Right, yes. The 911 Dakar, I went to Morocco to drive it in the Sahara Desert in deep sand. It was awesome. Please go watch that video. It took a long time and a lot of effort to make, and it's actually quite a good video if I say so myself. So people ask me on Instagram when they saw the car that I had this, they're like, you're going to go off-road? It's like, I went off-road. We have a video of that. We don't like to do the same thing twice. You're in a smoke tire. So the question is, how is the Dakar as a road car? Because a lot of owners will probably only drive it on the road, unfortunately. Right. Well, I shouldn't assume that they're all going to do that, but we have talked about safari lifted sports cars as being excellent for places with bad roads like Los Angeles or other places, and there's a convenience to having a sports car with crossover ride height. Right. People look at this like it's the perfect urban daily driver or great for bumpy canyon roads, and they're not entirely wrong, actually. But just like with Raptors and stuff like that, even though they're focused on off-road performance, that doesn't necessarily mean that most of the time they're going to be driven on the road. Right. Right. And I think more people than you think will take these off-road, but less than you want. It's probably like 20%. That's a good way to put it. We would have guessed like 5%. It's probably 20%, but you wish it was 80%. Yeah. Yeah. It's very true. Yeah. So anyway, it's the Dakar, right? It's a 911 992 GTS with a lifted suspension, some skid plates. Four-wheel, all-wheel drive. Of course. The all-wheel drive. Pirelli Scorpion tires. And they're 19s. They're slightly smaller than the ones that come on the GTS, right? Which means you can't get ceramics that fit. Right. So it's got steel brakes. Yep. Which is fine for this purpose. It's got a reconfigured front bumper with the radiators from the turbo. They're moved out to the side because you need that center for the clearance. Yep. And the radiators are also protected by stainless steel mesh instead of plastic. Right. And you've got this hydraulic lift suspension kit, which is a modified version of Porsche's own nose lift kit that allows you to raise the vehicle up for off-road mode or extra clearance, and then lower it in about five seconds. It's pretty quick. And in standard height, it's 50 millimeters higher than the normal GTS. And then if you hit the button, it goes up another 30. Right. So it's subtle, but it is helpful. Yeah. You really don't need it very much. Even if you're driving on like trails and stuff, you don't need to lift it all the time, but it does work. Did you guys use it in Morocco on the rock? On the sand and rock crawling? Yes. Fire roads and tarmac? No. Got it. Because impressively, you can go a hundred miles an hour in high mode. It's not like, you know, other cars with nose lift at 22, they go back down. Right. This will be a hundred miles per hour. I was really impressed. Yeah. You can go fast with it up. So, uh, let's, um, you know, speaking of going fast, speaking of going fast, this thing will do zero to 60 in four seconds on the dirt. So you should experience check. Right. And we're on dirt. We're not supposed to be on dirt. We have to get off dirt. Get off. Folks. Today's 911 Dakar review is brought to you by our friends at Mova Globe. I love these amazing globes. And every time someone comes to the studio here, they ask us about it. These globes are powered by light, ambient light, sunlight, even artificial light. They spin on their own with no batteries, no wires, no anything. And they come in so many different designs. You've got your traditional map style globe. You've got your photo realistic done from satellites. They have sports novelty ones. They have art pieces. They're amazing. They're a great gift for a loved one. They look great on your desk, on your shelf at home. You could even make a whole solar system out of the globes and they come in three different sizes. Everybody asks about them and I love looking at them too. So hit the link in the video description and use our discount code to get 10% off select Mova Globes right now. Get one for yourself, get one for your friend, get one for your family, and everyone will be mesmerized. Thanks to Mova Globe for sponsoring today's video. And now back to the mountains. Oh my God. And then the transition there is so fun. Good transition from dirt to tarmac. So when I, when we drove this up here on the highway, you know, it does, it's not soft. It doesn't feel like that. It doesn't ride like a Raptor. I feel like it rides much stiffer than a Raptor. Right. And it was, it's better than the, you know, GTS version on these cracks and things, but I was kind of surprised how many of these vibrations came through. But then when we do that transition from the dirt or some of the big rollers and compressions that are on this road, I went, Oh, I get it. This is meant for, you know, high speed, high load. Right here. Watch this. That yump takes that really well. And the one around this corner, it'll take the dip really well. Also the dip is right here. So that's really good. So I found in Morocco that I was super impressed with the capability off-road. But when we were on tarmac, I was like, this is a little stiffer than I expected it to be. It still has to be a sports car. Porsche, they're not looking to build a trophy truck, right? It still needs to do this. Well, it still needs to be responsive in the corners, which we know that the Raptor is not. I mean, it's a good truck, but, uh, you know, rally cars can have a lot of things to them, but this, they, they want it to be responsive on tarmac corners. And it, it's really impressive, like how much it lands in the middle, but I'm not saying that as like, Oh, it doesn't do either thing. Well, it's still responsive. You do need to put in a little bit more steering input than you would with a regular GTS. It's like a little bit slower, but in the tight stuff, as we'll get to with the rear steer, it's actually quite good. Real agile. Yeah. Right. I mean, this car will go around the Nurburgring quicker than a 996 GT3. It's amazing. So it's not slow and you've just put it into a sport shocks as we get into the tighter stuff here. I like that the body moves just enough that you can really transfer the weight. And I actually sort of like the reduced grip a little bit. I think that's kind of fun. Yeah, it's true. Like the reduced grip from those, uh, the Scorpions plus the rear steer. It's like, you don't know if the back is sliding or just rotating around, but it's still playful. Right. It's not nearly as compromised on the street as my G body Keen Project Safari was. I mean, that thing, it was, it was fine at going straight and it was amazing on dirt, but you couldn't go through this road like this. Whereas this is still a sports car, you know, first and foremost. Well, I feel like your Keen car, there was so much, it felt like there was more rolling mass in those tires. Well, they were to turn like they were probably much heavier than these. Yeah. There were 16s with like 65 series sidewalls. These are 19s with like 35 or 40 series sidewalls. Yeah. So you had all that flex you had to wait for and then it would turn. Whereas this and manual steering and a taller lift. So this, that car didn't have to be both things. It's the focus was changed for it to be much more towards dirt performance. This needs to find a real happy medium because Porsche knows that most people are going to drive them on the street and it has to be pleasant at that. Yeah. And it's, it's fast, but it's not like they didn't add any, they didn't change the engine for the GTS, right? They just like reload. They just, no more hardcore air filter basically. Yeah. Just better air filters and cooling that can keep up to with desert. Yeah. Power is the same 473 horsepower. Yeah. And 420 pound feet of torque, which is plenty. Like this car feels like a fast sports car. Yeah. And in the canyons, even with these tires and with, well, it's not actually that much heavier than that. It's only 10 kilograms heavier than the GTS, but it, it feels like you could compete or keep up with, you know, any decent sports car of today. Flip her around. Let's go back the other way. You can, I don't, you can keep driving. I've been dailying this thing for a week. And so I'm not even going to drive in this video. Oh, you don't need me to, but I can tell you that one thing that I noticed compared to Morocco now driving it in LA a year and change later is it, it is stiff on the street, stiffer than you think and, and stiffer than the Storado, but it's not as stiff as I remember it being. It actually in the context of our hometown feels a little softer than I remembered in Morocco to the point where I emailed Portia and I said, have there been any changes made from then to now? Or is it me that is just in different context? And they said, there's been no changes. You're just experiencing it differently. Wow. Okay. Interesting. Just the environment. Yeah. That's a quick vehicle. It's really quick. And on these bumpy Canyon roads, we've chosen this road because it's bumpy. I took it up another Canyon the other day. That's really bumpy. And it was great. Yeah. The difference is I'd say small, but, uh, noticeable and, and important because this road and the road you went on, it's the road we drove the Ioniq 5 and on, which was really bouncy. It feels like that road has kind of fallen apart or like the ground underneath it has started to shift a little bit. So there was a ton of like noise and vibration and upsets to the wheel. This kind of just turns all that volume down, but it still does sports car stuff. I mean, this is, it's so awesome. Yeah. It's not a slow street car. It's still a very quick street car. You'll probably go through tires faster than you'd like driving like this. Probably. And then, uh, what else did they change hardware wise? I mean, it has these semi skid plates, although they don't actually go that far back underneath the car. No. And there is a even tougher skid plate. You can get it. The dealer, if you really plan to off-road it, that's thicker metal and covers more of the undertray. So if you really plan to use it off-road, I'd probably recommend that. Um, they do the, uh, the carbon bonnet out of the GT3 to save some weight. They do the lightweight glass to save some weight. You know, they do the rear seat delete. That's part of the math trickery of, well, it's only 10 pounds heavier than GTS, but they've also deleted some things to get it back to that. Like the rear seat, whereas a GTS has a standard rear seat. Well, and then they, the buckets are included, right? But you can get the sports sheet, sports sheet, sports seats are no cost option. Uh, you don't get the money back. Yeah. I believe so. Not getting the buckets. So that's, you know, that's how they, they, they finagle the math for base weight, right? Right. It doesn't make them wrong. It's just like, well, what's standard and what's optional. And that's, you know, it's. If you lose a leg, you will lose weight, Matt Farah. You'll reach whatever goal you might have. We should go back. We put it back in soft mode. Oh yeah. It's back to the sport out of rally. I pretty much drive it in soft suspension all the time. I haven't found a real use case for the sport shock yet. I hit it soft. You clicked it back to sport, which clicked the firm back on. And you know, the only thing is so, yeah, so silly with a giant roof rack. That's a, that's a good yum. Yeah. Yeah. The roof rack is optional. Uh, I kind of like it. I like the lights on the roof. Um, when they dropped this car off at the shop, it had all these accessories on there. I took them all off because I felt really dumb driving around with fuel jugs and stuff on the roof. I also feel kind of silly with this rough roads livery. I'm not really about that. Yeah. Uh, a regular color would be just fine, you know? Totally. I mean, this is a callback to, you know, the, the car race car, the Rothman's car, but I don't think that that livery style translates to this era. I think, I think it looks weird. It's just, it's from a different time, a different design time, and it doesn't look very good. And so I, for me, the callback isn't a good callback. And that's the problem with all Porsche heritage liveries. They worked on the cars in the period, like the Targa heritage had that livery from a three 56, which looked fine on a three 56, but looks dumb on a nine, two. Yeah. Kind of the same thing here, particularly when they don't use the actual Rothman's because cigarettes, I understand. I'm sympathetic, but just give us the colors. It doesn't need to say rough roads. That's silly, right? I do like the rough roads floor mats though. Those are kind of cool. Cause now it seems like a Halloween costume, but they couldn't license Spider-Man, you know? So it's arachnid boy or something like that. Exactly. Yes. It is a, it is like the bad B movie version of Rothman's. Yeah. I would just get it in a regular color. And then if I really wanted a livery, I'd have a vinyl shop, do something fun. You know, if that's what I wanted, we should talk about the price of these things. It's so that's the biggest problem. Cause I looked it up last night. There's a couple of dealerships in LA. They're selling them. They're asking three 75. Yeah. A couple hard. No. Yeah. Hard. No. The biggest problem with this car by far is this right here. Limited to 2,500. The fact that it's a limited edition collectible incentivizes people to not use it, how it's meant to be used. It prices it with this ADM in a way that people can't even get them. The sticker on this is $257,000. That's already too much for this already. That's turbo S with options, right? Like it's like almost like we said with ST, this should be like a $40,000 option pack for the GTS unlimited. Thank you, sir. Because there's nothing about this that's precious where it's like, well, there's only, uh, this many, uh, suspension kits ever made. We can't possibly, they could make as many of these as they want. Yeah. Yeah. Very true. Choosing to make it a collectible incentivizes it not being used the way that it could and should be used. Right. And maybe we can make a prediction. If past precedent says anything about the future, what they'll do next year is shoot all those flippers in the foot by making the Dakar option package for Carrera S unlimited. That would be pretty interesting. Awesome. Right. Awesome. Right. The 911 R treatment. Exactly. And that, and Porsche loves doing that stuff, shooting people in the foot, uh, that flip their cars. So maybe they'll do that. That would be rad because like dynamically and like fun wise and whimsy wise, huge fun, the best. And if you get to take this on a, like, well, you got to like take it on a rally road. I mean, you can, this is the car I would want to drive from here to the Colorado hill climb run up. Cause that's still dirt and then drive it home and I'll do the Jeff's wart, but now, but still on dirt. I mean, this is such a comfortable vehicle to drive around and then to go shred a fire road if you can. Oh my God. Yeah. But, but to make it a limited high value collectible just sucks all the potential fun out of it. Because even really rich people I've learned this in the car storage business, even really rich people don't like losing money. Even if they can, even if a billionaire buys this, he's not going to want to run it into the ground because billionaires don't like losing money on anything. It's a pride thing. That's true. And it's dumb. Cause it's a great, like, it's kind of a good overland light vehicle. You know, someone, a friend, well, someone I follow his name's Kevin. He has one of these, he drove a 2000 miles crisscross a bunch of dirt and it's like, yeah, you can just head off, head on a B road, then head up a farm road, then crisscross a state on dirt. And you can do that kind of stuff. You should at least do that. If you're not going to rally, rally it. Yeah. Um, you know, if you're rich, please lose money on these. That's the way to live. You can't, you know, that's, that's what money's for. Right. Right. For living. And if you're a Porsche, don't make this limited edition. There's no reason for it. It just sell them. Then people will buy them and use them what they're meant for and life will be better. Yeah. Right. Right. So if you want to see me drive this car, go watch the off-road video. We'll put the link in the description, me and Morocco driving it in the sand dunes. And, uh, thank you guys for watching. We'll see you later. And remember always fight your tickets on the off the record app available in the Android and iOS store, or go to off the record.com slash TST.