Fasten your harnesses and prepare for flappy cheeks... it’s time to meet the winged stars of this year’s Speed Week
WORDS OLLIE MARRIAGE PHOTOGRAPHY JOHN WYCHERLEY
You can’t see air move. Pity really. It’s doing a lot of work around here. Some of it good, some more... alarming. The wind turbine at the top of the Gotlandring’s jump churns in the breeze as I watch Wookie hurl the 911 Dakar up the blind ramp. Hitting the lip at 92mph, the raised nose catches the wind and the damn thing pulls the mother of all wheelies.
I gulp. I’m sitting at the bottom in the GT3 RS, knowing I’ve got to follow him and that this, the wildest, most track focused road-going 911 there’s ever been, will be able to take so much more speed up that slope – 106mph, it’ll turn out. And yet I can barely get it off the ground. The air that had lifted the Dakar can’t find a way under the GT3 RS. Porsche has clearly learned a lot since the days of backflipping GT1s.
The Dakar isn’t part of this test, but the contrast between the two Porsches is a perfect illustration of what air can do, how it can be bent to your will or bend you to its. How powerful and dense this invisible force is.
I take the Alpine next, but it doesn’t have the necessary power to hit wheel lifting speeds. Probably just as well given it’s downforce-lite in this company. The others make full claims of figures and speeds, Alpine will only say “up to 29kg more than an A110S with aero kit”.
The Ariel (110kg of downforce at 70mph) fails to break the bonds of gravity for different reasons. I chicken out. I do the jump twice, the second time to check that the first time had been as squirrelly and unsettling as I’d thought. Less to do with the car I realise as I look at the direction the wind turbine is pointing. Cross wind. Played havoc with the 700kg lightweight.
Time for tyres do what they were designed to do: be pressed into tarmac, ideally as firmly as possible. I start in the Alpine for no other reason than it needs less balls. The rear wing is apologetic, the A110R still uses the same 296bhp 1.8-litre turbo engine as the A110S and despite extensive carbon work, it’s only 34kg lighter. Love those carbon wheels though, especially the disc-like rears.
It’s the perfect introduction to the Gotlandring. Deft, agile, beautifully balanced chassis, not enough power to give yourself a scare. The superfast bottom section is actually surprisingly bumpy, catching out other cars including the McLaren Ar
