The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of the 2023 Porsche 911 Dakar.
For as long as mankind has drawn breath, chimeras and monsters have disturbed our understanding. Thought to be things of myth, they haunt our dreams and the dark corners of our most unwelcome thoughts. Try to look at them directly, and they escape before our brains can acknowledge their impossible nature.
Unholy chimeras with the heads of lions and the tails of serpents. Diabolical griffins with the maws of eagles and the haunches of great cats. Blasphemous German sport coupes with lifted suspensions and all-terrain tires throwing sand onto the skid plates that protect their rear-mounted engines.
Ungodly things, all. And here comes the most depraved of them. Isn’t it glorious?
A Lifted, Off-Road 911 In Dealerships
Porsche has taken one of the most splendid things ever built for the roadway and used witchcraft and unforgivably dark imagination to prep it for sand, snow, and mud.
The 2023 Porsche 911 Dakar isn’t some one-off fantastic abomination made for a single race. You’ll find it in showrooms next year. You can own one. And may all history’s gods defend you from what wrath it brings.
Porsche says it “will be the first two-door sports car to offer outstanding off-road capabilities.” Porsche just…says that. As if countless forgotten Cassandras haven’t warned us against that.
[ed – Sean, you have to break character here and point out that Porsche has a bit of rally racing history and has even won the Paris-Dakar Rally in a modified 911 before.]
[Can’t. Scared.]
Already Tested All Over the World
Porsche says it has put 300,000 miles on test mules developing this demonic union of a 911 and a trophy truck. Porsche threw it around in the snow in Sweden. They jumped it off dunes in Morocco. They wrung it out on the Château de Lastours off-road track in southern France “to test the car’s handling on typical rally courses and fine-tune the suspension.”
Presumably at night, to hide its terrible beauty from an unready world.
Even Porsche test driver Romain Dumas says he was confused by the assignment to test drive a 911 on unstable gravel switchbacks. “I knew what a 911 could do on the road,” says Dumas, “but I was absolutely stunned by how well the car performed here on the loose.”
Two-time world rally champion Walter Röhrl reined the monster in on a frozen lake in Sweden. “No Porsche customer will believe all the things you can do with this car before they’ve driven it themselves,” he reports.
Like most creatures of myth, we can only speculate on what powers it. Rumors say it’s the twin-turbo 3.0-liter flat-6 from the Carrera 4S, with its 443 horsepower.
Porsche will unleash the beast at next week’s Los Angeles Auto Show. For now, they’ve provided photos. Those wonderful fantails of sand under all four wheels suggest it’s all-wheel-drive.
That’s all the world can know about this Eldritch god of the automotive realm for now. Porsche will release it from the spells that hold it back on November 16 in Los Angeles — at 10 p.m., presumably to preserve the innocence of the day.
We can’t wait.
