Porsche 900 RS Lightweight: Hot rod for masochists

Stripped of all but the essentials to lose weight, this Carrera delivered thrills that felt like torture, says Brian Sewell

Twenty years ago and more, when I had the leisure to explore the wilds of Turkey, I settled on the Peugeot 404 as ideal transport, its extraordinary suspension making it as useful as the Range Rover I tried in 1976.

The journey from London to Istanbul it could handle in two-and-a-half days, but there was, through Germany, the constant irritant of the overtaking Porsche. With fuel injection the 404 could dice with any middling Mercedes, but by the Porsche 911 it was invariably trounced and the neat, squat, raucous little car nipped past and disappeared into the distance.

One day, I promised myself, I would buy a Porsche 911 and have a holiday in Germany driving it as Germans do. I would do what I did in the mid-Sixties with a Daimler SP250 - be irresponsible and have fun.

The dream returned to haunt me in the winter of 1992 when I encountered a Porsche Carrera regarded by purists as the best of all the many 911 variants, the most perfectly distilled incarnation, the "fabulous'' RS Lightweight of 1973.

This is a car of which sane men have written with rapture of physical union with it, as though in driving it they had undergone some hermaphroditic transmutation (a car is, by tradition, female), become part of it and it of them.

Every decent driver "feels'' with his machine, but the driver of this Porsche seems to take his self-abnegation to extremes.

A sub-cult is devoted to the noises that it makes; in response to these, sane men have confessed to goose-pimples and raised hairs on backs of necks, and no music critic ever waxed more lyrical over the crescendos of Beethoven than motoring journalists seduced by the Porsche's banshee wails: in ordinary circumstances the RS growls and grunts and snarls, but with the slightest tip of the toe on the accelerator, the revs rising to the permitted 6,300rpm, the engine shrieks against the tender anvil of the ear.

The decibel level within the car is much the same as suffered by those who sit on the back seat of a rear-engined bus (and the heat too), but it is the shrill exhaust that makes the torment exquisite for masochists.

The engine was the fourth generation boxer six, 2 litres grown to 2.7, air-cooled, its output at full tilt 210bhp. The car accelerated to a mile a minute in under six seconds, though a less wary driver than I could have trimmed that figure. But to press hard on the accelerator required more courage than I could muster, so screamingly immediate was the response, the phrase "kick in the back'' inadequate to convey the flattening distortion of one's liver under such accelerative force.

These figures now seem unremarkable, the maximum speed of 153mph, particularly so, but in the year of its production it was the fastest car on the road. It made me sick.

The particular car of which I write was sold at Christie's; it was then 19 years old and one might have thought it past its prime, but it made me sick - I thought then with speed, but in retrospect it may have been as much with sheer discomfort.

Comfort was an irrelevance in the RS, from which everything that represented both it and refinement had been stripped to reduce weight. It had no rear seats, no carpets, no soundproofing, no glove-box lid, no passenger's sun visor, no radio, no clock and no door trim.

The two front seats were so firm that the first impression was of being strapped to a park bench on a rollercoaster. These revisions to the standard Carrera brought the weight down to 900 kilos, that is by about the weight of two whole passengers, but at the cost of intolerable heat, noise and (to me) nausea.

The steering is direct - rarely does one need to move the wheel more than an inch or two through sweeping bends; through sharp bends at speed it seemed that the car still had that residual Volkswagen feeling that if push came to shove the rear end might try to catch up with the front. Gear-changing is slick, with a high fifth gear that was then a rarity.

And the great surprise is that, once one is used to the response of the engine, the car is as tractable in urban traffic as it is formidable on a motorway.

Even now it still looks startlingly modern and functional. Its immaculate uncluttered line and form at once gave it extraordinary presence - parked between a lofty Rolls-Royce and a lengthy Lincoln of that year, this comparatively tiny car took the eye, held it and was a thing of "oohs'' and "aahs'' to boys of every age.

Ten years on, the RS had, alas, developed ugly wheel arches, squared half-circles, so to speak, its rear line spoiled by an unnecessary aerofoil and the word Carrera writ large along its flanks, but in all other things it was the body as before.

Its line still informs the body of its latest successor, still a 911, a five-star car according to the current pundits, a supercar that "reclaims its place as the ultimate driver's car", but to be this it now has a 3.8-litre engine and 355bhp.

To have the Porsche racket in your ears, however, the motoring equivalent of Callas at full scream, it is the 1973 2.7-litre Carrera RS Lightweight that you must have. Porsche built 1,036 and they are thus not rare, but many have competition history and a distinguished provenance, and these mystical associations turn cars into costly relics.