So let’s deal with some awkward dates first. Last year, to mark half a century of one of the greatest cars ever made, Porsche introduced the 911 Turbo 50 Years. It said it would make 1,974 of them, for reasons that won’t need explaining, and that the car would carry a 3.7-litre flat-six capable of kicking out 650hp, delivering the sort of performance that would invert your spleen. At £200k-plus, it was a fine way to celebrate an automotive icon.
But the thing about anniversaries is that with periodic predictability they come and go, and as will not have escaped your attention, it is no longer the year of our Lord 2024, and therefore no longer the 50th anniversary of the Porsche 911 Turbo.
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So why a review now? Two reasons. First, because it’s taken until the late spring of 2025 for Porsche to get a press car on the roads. In its wisdom, Porsche gives its press cars a good going-over before they’re released to people like me, who more often than not know their way around a keyboard much better than they do a double wishbone front suspension system. And that can take a bit of time.
And second, because while it’s no longer the 50th anniversary year of the 911 Turbo, it is nonetheless the 50th anniversary of something distinctly 911 Turbo. Distinctly, that is, if you’re British.
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Back in 1975, a year after the Porsche 911 Turbo debuted at the Frankfurt Motor Show, Porsche’s UK press department registered the numberplate 911 HUL and attached it to the first Turbo press car ever to grace British roads. Google it, and you’ll find a picture of a pristine white Turbo in front of a distinctly sooty Houses of Parliament.
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Over the next five decades, this plate would be passed down through a succession of Porsche press cars, mostly but not exclusively 911 Turbos, so that it appeared in newspapers and magazines and on posters and TV shows too numerous to count. A rule of thumb emerged: if a 911 carried the numberplate 911 HUL, it was a special 911. A very special 911.
And so it was that a year on from the 50th anniversary of the Porsche 911 Turbo and on the 50th anniversary of a numberplate, I found myself the first to drive the Turbo 50 press car, numberplate 911 HUL, on British roads. That, no question, felt very special, too. Those fellow 911 drivers going the other way who flashed their headlights will know exactly what I mean.
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Half a century of high-octane heritage
What then of the car? Well, it came with a whopping lollipop ’50’ decal in bright white on both side panels that some peers mistook to mean I too had reached the half-century landmark and that I had bought myself a Porsche (I have not). In that performative, walking-the-brash-tightrope style perfected by 911 Turbos, it had further shimmering decals with the words ‘Porsche’ along the sills and ‘Turbo’ over the car’s intakes and flared rear wheel arches. Say what you like about lairy Max Power decals on the world’s favourite everyday supercar; it looked fantastic.
Beyond those, no nostalgic massive rear spoiler. Porsche stuck giant ‘whale tails’ to pre-Millennium Turbos, of course, and for those of us in middle age and on, these still define the model’s amped-up aesthetic, even more than its blistering performance (in 1974, the first 911 Turbo climbed to 60mph in a prompt 5.5 seconds).
Not that there isn’t a spoiler. There is. Only now the ‘duck tail’ is far more discreet, tucked away at low speeds and only rising when the car detects a heavy right foot, or when you scroll through the touch screen menus and find the tickbox that invites you to extend it ‘manually’ – and then press it. Like the switch on the dash that activates the sport exhaust mode (louder, growlier, obviously), I learned quickly how to find it.
Inside and out, my car made the most of Porsche’s ‘Heritage Design Package 50 Years Turbo’, an £11,790 option that adds lots of #iykyk finishing touches, from the historic 1964 Porsche crest on the bonnet to the liberal interior application of Dress Mackenzie tartan, another 1970s Turbo throwback.
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What’s it like to drive? First impressions will be familiar to owners of a 992, the eighth-generation 911. Sit in the cabin and every detail feels obsessively measured (bar the fact two dashboard gauges are obscured by the steering wheel), and while it’s spacious and comfortable with plenty of headroom even for this 6’ 6” specimen, it feels taut and willing, bristling with sports-car pedigree.
And then, boy, does it go. Twiddle the mode dial on the steering wheel to Sport Plus to harness all 650 of those horsepowers and the car will reach 62mph from a standing start in a frankly unholy 2.7 seconds. For comparison, that’s faster than the track-day spec 911 GT3 RS. And you should see the spoiler on that. If you’re still conscious, the Turbo 50 will keep going up through its eight gears to 205mph. Oh, to have been in Germany to find out exactly what that feels like.
As it was, even on the pockmarked and needle-narrow roads of England’s south west, and even with its firm ride and shudderingly effective ceramic brakes, the Turbo 50 felt completely wonderful. Porsche’s intensely impressive four-door Taycan Turbo has an identical 0-62mph time, and yet somehow the rushing whine and brain-blur that accompanies its torquey acceleration pales next to the stomach-pinching force the Turbo 50 spits out. It’s fabulous.
Some car. Some numberplate. Some story. But time to pass it on. Before this anniversary’s over, too.
The Porsche 911 Turbo 50 Years costs from £200,600. As tested, £222,140. porsche.com
