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Porsche 911 GT3 Cup ANDIAL Edition First Drive

There is only one Porsche 911 GT3 Cup ANDIAL Edition on the planet, and its owner is standing patiently in the hot pits at Oklahoma's Hallett Motor Racing Circuit, watching attentively as his prized possession circles the challenging road course at speed. I'm the lucky soul strapped firmly in the cockpit of the white-and-blue racecar. The tight carbon-fiber seat is cutting into my hips, the racket from the gearbox is making me deaf and a river of sweat is flowing off the tip my nose – blame the high ambient temperatures combined with the stress of driving someone else's expensive machine on an utterly unfamiliar circuit. But don't expect me to complain, gripe or come into the pits early, as I'm having the time of my life – I've eagerly waited nearly half-a-year for this moment, and short of me blacking out, there's no way I'm cutting it short. It's been said that ANDIAL-prepared cars and engines have claimed victories on every major racetrack in this country. Belting into the driver's seat of an ANDIAL-prepared Porsche fulfills a personal dream that started decades earlier when I thumbtacked a picture of a white Porsche 935 on my dorm room wall, its colorful bodywork stenciled with "ANDIAL" along the bottom of the driver's door. In the 1980s, the name of the privately held racing company was synonymous with Porsche and victory – it's been said that ANDIAL-prepared cars and engines have claimed victories on every major racetrack in this country. As its founders retired and the company focused on smaller specialty projects, ANDIAL's business model changed, but its relationship with Porsche remained strong. In early 2013, it was announced that the Porsche Motorsports North America, Inc. (PMNA) had purchased the brand – yet there was still no word as to how the famed ANDIAL name, an anagram made from the names of the founding members – the late Arnold Wagner (AN), Dieter Inzenhofer (DI) and former PMNA president and current consultant Alwin Springer (AL) would be used. Some answers emerged in February of this year when I received a phone call from Porsche. The company offered to have me to visit ANDIAL's shop in Southern California, which is now operating entirely under the direction of PMNA. Entering one of the shop's bays, I found myself face-to-face with a lightly used 997 GT3 Cup racecar. The vehicle was in the early stages of a complete teardown and rebuild – in preparation for its rollout in traditional red, white and blue ANDIAL livery.

2016 Porsche Boxster Spyder First Drive [w/video]

The recipe for the 2011 Porsche Boxster Spyder cooked up a meal that everyone loved. Yes, even with the three-piece, Erector Set canvas top that took one journalist 30 minutes to lower the first time. Boiled down, the 2011 model was a Boxster S with 10 extra horsepower and 176 fewer pounds, graced with accelerated reflexes. For the second coming of the Boxster Spyder, Porsche fortified the ingredients it used in the first. It starts with the Boxster GTS and adds the 3.8-liter flat-six from the 911 Carrera S, tuned to 375 horsepower and 301 pound-feet of torque. The Spyder subtracts around 72 pounds compared to the Boxster GTS, weighing in at 2,899 pounds. This, then, is both the most powerful and the lightest Boxster you can get. For you fact-checkers out there, the entry-level Boxster is listed at 2,888 pounds on the Porsche USA site, but a spokesman points out that, "the metric for determining weight has changed, which increased the amount of fluids necessary to perform weight testing." In other words, the base Boxster is unchanged, but the real-world curb weight is actually higher. It's ridiculous to quibble over 11 pounds – or whatever the difference is – because the Boxster Spyder has 110 more horsepower and 96 more pound-feet than the base model. With a successful technique already established, we thought the latest Boxster Spyder would even more of a raucous and rowdy good time than its predecessor. But it's not. The standard Boxster Spyder doesn't come with manual A/C or a stereo, but both can be added for no additional cost. The exterior, at least, exhibits the right kind of maturity. Front and rear fascias swiped from the Cayman GT4 add 10 millimeters in length compared to other Boxsters. Those pieces make the car lighter, along with items like the aluminum doors and decklid. The bulges behind the roll hoops, called streamliners, are the can't-miss-it references to Porsche's historic and legendary Spyders. In case admirers still don't get it, Spyder badges sit atop each rear quarter panel. Inside, the leather, body-colored trim, and copious amount of Alcantara is like a track-day package arranged by Prada. The steering wheel is shared with the Cayman GT4. The lightweight sport seats that hug like a carbon fiber cradle in our test car aren't available in our market. Different sport seats are standard in the US, racier buckets are a $4,750 option.

2015 Porsche Cayenne S E-Hybrid

Think of the electric motor in the facelifted 2015 Porsche Cayenne S E-Hybrid as the cream filling in an Oreo cookie. Under the hood of this plug-in hybrid crossover is a 333-horsepower, supercharged 3.0-liter V6 with a 95-hp synchronous electric motor sandwiched between it and an eight-speed Tiptronic automatic transmission. The clutched powertrain allows pure combustion, pure electric or a combination of both to drive all four wheels through Porsche's permanent all-wheel-drive system.
Differentiating itself from the Panamera S E-Hybrid sedan, which shares the same basic powertrain and stores energy in a 9.4-kWh battery, the Cayenne crossover is fit with a more robust 10.8-kWh lithium-ion battery that delivers an estimated pure-electric driving range of up to 22 miles at speeds of up to 78 miles per hour.
To be one of the very first US media members to sample Porsche's latest fuel-efficient crossover, the automaker flew us to Frankfurt, Germany, to test the five-passenger Cayenne S E-Hybrid on its home turf.