The Porsche 550 Spyder is the car that James Dean died in. He had the misfortune to come to a road intersection that merged without any warning signs at JUST the wrong time when a heavy truck was going the same way. Bad luck. I don't think the car was the problem, or even him. Just bad luck. He only had about a second and a half to see the truck out of the corner of his eye, judge its speed and hit the brakes to save his life. Not enough.
It is a beautiful little car. Very short, very space age aluminum body, extremely light. Closest thing to that today, with a hard top, is the Lotus Elise. The 550 is the MOST reproduced kit car design, apparently, which makes sense. It is so very light, and so small, and fast because it is light, it is a good place to work from for a proper sports car. The Miata weighs around twice as much. My neighbor's Miata is just abused and looks like hell and I wince every time I see it. Makes me reconsider other ultralight cars like the Datsun 510, which a friend had in High School and raced before we graduated. Another classmate had a real Mini, not a modern Reproduction, and sometimes parked it in the breezeways instead of the parking lot. It was so small nobody seemed to mind, actually. Yes, that's a bit eccentric, but the entire town's water supply flowed out of a mercury mine, so Crazy seems to be the thing to have. We were all mad as hatters.
The downside of the Spyder is its got a swing rear axle, just like the 356, rather than all independent rear double wishbone suspension. This means that the rear axel steers the car under load, which can kill you. Despite this flaw, the car won many races and in the simulator, it is so light that it grips on every corner. This remains true until you do something stupid like give it too much power, which in mid engine cars is a sure-fire way to kill yourself.
One of the makers of Spyder reproductions is Beck, of Bremen Indiana. They have a model that uses the Subaru 2.5 liter turbo engine, which would be a good choice. The Subaru IS based on the 911 engine, or the VW engine if you prefer, the horizontally opposed boxer engine. This doubles your torque, which helps the car take off like a shot, and pull hills. Considering a car like this is all about the handling and acceleration, torque is what you want to whip around corners.
Sadly, I keep finding that mid engine cars are very unstable at the apex, and having driven the Porsche Cayman, the Boxster hardtop, which is also mid engine, in the simulator, it is good on twisty roads but give it a hard 90 flat corner and it will end up backwards into a tree. Same as a 911. This is really annoying, and so far the only cars I've driven which avoid it are the Elise clones and the all wheel drive cars, which unfortunately will lose grip seconds before you notice and by then you're hurtling sideways unable to do anything to regain control. As I keep getting into serious wrecks in the simulator, which admittedly does not provide critical Gee-force feedback which is to driving what having no sense of smell is to eating, as in critically flawed, I'm a bit peeved at the lack of proper response. Still, if I were this bad at driving in the real world, I'd have wrecked every car, have insurance rates similar to a proper income, and spend lots of time in hospitals getting physical therapy.
The upside is the simulator is cheap, and I can find out which expensive cars suck without spending the money. I still think the Fiesta is the most consistently fun car, for hot hatchbacks. For coupes, I still see the Acura Integra or Civic RS as the most fun, though that could be because I learned to drive in the Acura and I'm totally used to its power to weight and handling on proper country roads.
Keep in mind that Dad went through a series of 911's on these same roads, and fully restored a 356, which was gorgeous when it was done, bought by a viciously angry divorcee who then complained that the rearview mirror was from a Mercedes, which is true, but so what? We risked our lives buying that in Emeryville at the classic car junkyard, a very BAD and dangerous place. Sort of like Detroit is now. Dad's various 911s and 912 and 914 and the 356C were all projects he bought cheap, spent a fair bit on parts, and then restored engines and bodies and repainted, drove a while, then sold. Never quite happy with the result, or just not interesting enough. I can relate. I've built projects and fiddled and some projects are easy to toy with and still get good results, others a lot more finicky. Think toast. That proper brown vs burnt is 10 seconds too much.
A Porsche is also specialized. A good sports car but not a great daily driver. They rattle, they're noisy, they have lousy stereos, they're close to the ground, they are wide so don't fit well in parking lots and get many door dings, and sometimes scrape on a high center road. A Subaru is probably a better car, and I know our Acura was. It was hard to make the Acura exciting on the road, but you weren't wondering if you'd just ripped out the oil pan or transmission either. That's the trouble with REAL country roads. They kinda move around. A Subaru is unfortunately too heavy to really throw around in a fun way, which is the big upside of a front wheel drive or a rear wheel drive, though a real wheel is trickier with its throttle control. And maybe that's a good thing. You know it wants to kill you, but it rewards you if you control it right.
Ideally, a Porsche 550 Spyder is the best car ever, being the lightest mid engine built, and thus the best balanced, and so light and unsafe that it was originally described as motorcycle with 4 wheels. I wouldn't mind owning one for weekend drives, but for grocery shopping or rainy days or air conditioning, I think the Fiesta would suit me better.
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