2021 Porsche 911 Turbo S Cabriolet First Drive: Why It's Like a Baby Veyron

A month ago, I wondered aloud online what to do with a car like the Porsche 911 Carrera S Cabriolet. My thinking was: In this age of necessary versus unnecessary, the nearly $150,000 ragtop seemed a bit … flip. Fair to Porsche? No, as it's not Zuffenhausen's fault we're in this funk. But another unaffordable automotive bauble for the well-heeled, well, I had a hard time making sense of it. Then. Pardon the Updike reference, but a month of Sundays later, andyeah babyan $85,000 more expensive version of said 911 with nearly 200 extra horsepower makes all the sense in the world. Meet the 2021 Porsche 911 Turbo S Cabriolet, or as I've been calling it, Baby Veyron.

Our road test editor mentioned it in his review of the hardtop Turbo S, but Chris Walton and I did stand 6 feet apart from each other, completely slack jawed after running that red monster up and down the canyon. Gob smacked, really. As Chris said, "It's sharp, delicate, precise, talkative, but bloody fast, too. I wasn't expecting this at all. This is a driver's car." The new Turbo drove as if Porsche's own skunkworks team in Weissach got their hands on the perennial dentists' fave (and they did, kind of). We did not see this 2021 Turbo S coming.

To oversimplify things a bit, one of two things happens when you cut the roof off a car: It either gets better or it gets worse. The McLaren 720S Spider—for example—gets better, much better, as a folding hardtop. Top up, the Spider feels identical to the coupe, and then when you feel like it, you can drop the top. The Lamborghini Huracan EVO Spyder (the Brits spell it Spider, the Italians Spyder) on the other hand, gets much worse. The stowage space for the cloth top intrudes into the cabin making life uncomfortable for those of us under 6 feet and plain miserable for tall people. Most cars get worse.

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Back to better, there's another car that's better sans roof—the Bugatti Veyron. A targa top 1,000-hp Veyron is called Grand Sport, and the removable roof 1,200-hp version is called the Vitesse. Like the aforementioned McLaren, since the Veyron has a carbon fiber tub, removing the structural bonus of the roof does basically nothing in terms of stiffness. The car feels exactly the same, only now you can hear the eight-liter, 16-cylinder, quad-turbo steam factory boiling better right behind your head. Truly one of the world's greatest automotive experiences. Another part of that magic is when you jump on the Bugatti's throttle. With other cars, you gun 'em and they shake, shimmy, scramble for traction, squat, just futz around before they accelerate down the X-axis. Not the Veyron. Pardon the rephrasing of a worn cliché, but the Veyronaccelerateslike it's on rails. It's magic.

So Quick

The Turbo S Cabriolet gets off the line like that. Leave it to Porsche to figure out a way to make a non-carbon tub convertible feel as stiff as its roofed counterpart, but they did. Then there's the power. The previous generation 911 Turbo S (the 991.2, specifically) was already quicker than a Veyron to 60 mph (2.5 seconds versus 2.7) and lost the quarter-mile by a tenth (10.5 versus 10.4). Sadly, we never tested a Grand Sport, a Super Sport, or a Vitesse (Bugatti is horribly annoying when it comes to letting us test its cars). Likewise, we are currently unable to test anything. I'm speaking from sense memory here, but I remember very well the first time I found a straight chunk of road in a Veyron Grand Sport and just buried the throttle. Likewise, in the Turbo S Cab with the top down. In both instances I thought to myself, "140 mph? That's crazy!" In both cases, that sort of speed was achieved without much effort in way fewer seconds than you'd think possible. Drama-free yet halfway to hyperspace.

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What's the Cabin Like?

As Porsche Turbos tend to be as much luxury machines as they are horizontal rocket ships, we've got to talk interior. First of all, (and yeah, it's part of the exterior, but you can see it from inside the car when it's folded) go red roof, go! Want to guess the price for choosing red? You probably didn't guess it, because it's $0. It's one hell of a roof, too. I can't remember if Porsche had eight engineers work for four years on 991's roof (now mostly carried over to the 992), or four boffins spend eight years on it, but all of Zuffenhausen's folding roofs are the best the industry has to offer.

Speaking of zero dollars, the Bordeaux Red leather interior costs you nothing. I should point out, though, that the base price of this thing is $217,500, and as-tested, this sucker stickers for $232,730.Whistling noise. I love the throwback to the 930-generation quilted door panels, as well as the quilting on all four seats. I will now say something quite controversial—I like the small yet chunky shifter. Why? It's logical. All it needs to do is choose either forward, neutral, or reverse. Why have some oversized stick that just takes up space and functionally does the same thing? I think people will eventually come around to understanding why Porsche did what they did. For now, I'm aware just how much the internethatesthe new shifter. Anyhow, great insides, here.

Back to my Baby Veyron assertion, and I know I may as well be critiquing the air conditioning on the Space Shuttle, but the cockpit of a Veyron is an impressive place to sit. The leather, the metal work, the design, are all top shelf. Bugatti's quality is unmatched in the supercar and hyper car world. While the new 992 isn't quite up to the level of a seven-figure French dream car, it's not so far off, especially in terms of materials and—I wish there was a good synonym for quality—build quality. Of the competition—Ferraris, Lambos, McLarens, Astons, Jags—none feel nearly as solid. The most similar is probably the AMG GT, but of course cars feeling like they're carved from a single block of marble has long been a Mercedes value. Here's the too long; didn't read version: You'll enjoy being inside the new Turbo S.

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Mega Top Down Performance

How does Porsche do it, and specifically, how does this luxo-rocket get it done? There's a freak of a twin-turbo 3.8-liter flat-six just forward of the rear bumper that makes 640 horsepower and 590 pound-feet of torque.And,unlike Turbos of old, there's no max-torque only during overboost (whatever that means). This engine's peak torque is 590 lb-ft, period. Couple that power to the latest and greatest version of Porsche's PDK double-clutch gearbox and a smart all-wheel drive system, and you get accelerative magic. With the roof missing, it's just that much more fantastic!

Ferociously quick with a seemingly never-ending reserve of both torque and gears, the Turbo S Cabriolet gets up and goes, goes, goes. Then, you bigfoot the refreshingly soft and therefore easy to modulate brake pedal, and it clamps 10 pistons each onto 16.5-inch carbon ceramic front rotors and, I'll just put it simply, you stop.

What about handling? Because there's more weight and (probably) more body flexing, the Cabriolet is simply not as sharp in the twisty bits as the coupe is. To be fair, the all-singing, all-dancing, Guards Red hardtop Walton and I drove was a bit more performance oriented than the white Cab in question, as it had both the Sports Exhaust option as well as the Weissach-developed PASM (lowered sport suspension). To be blunt, this Turbo S did not feel like a GT3 RS with 120 extra horsepower the way the red one did. Not that it was sloppy, but it just wasn't a sublime handler. Very good, if not excellent, but not otherworldly, you know? Still, was I able to leave every other car for dead on every canyon run I made? Dear God, yes. The car's capabilities are seriously humbling.

The grip is extreme—same staggered tires as the coupe, Pirelli P Zero NA1s, 255/3520 93Y up front and 315/30R21 105Y out back—and the car's neutral behavior (no oversteer, no understeer) is excellent and frankly how AWD cars should handle. The car was just lacking the track car sharpness of its fixed-roof sibling. Also, you have to get the Sport Exhaust. You just do. Why? Because with it, the Turbo S goes from sounding like two industrial grade hair dryers to four!

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Conclusion

That leaves us with two conclusions. The first is that any issue I've mentioned seems as if it could be solved via Porsche's online Turbo S configurator. As with all things, throwing money at a problem is a solution, generally speaking. But it's the second point that I think takes precedent: You're not buying the Cabriolet to be a GT3 replacement. Nope, you are buying the roofless version for theal frescovibes it feeds you. The rush and the wind and the sights, sounds, smells—all those lovely sensory-tickling intangibles convertibles give off. You wouldn't take the coupe on a languid drive up the coast. You would take the Cab, choking on pleasure the entire time. Especially when some Prius (or similar) is annoyingly moving under the speed limit and the big sign says, "Passing Lane Ahead. Slower Traffic Keep Right." After all, 99.9 percent of traffic should zag right. There's a reason I've been calling this thing Baby Veyron.