If, upon finishing this review, you decide to go out and buy Porsche's latest SUV -- a phrase which still flicks at the mind disconcertingly -- you could do no worse than to head down to Jacksonville, Fla., to Brumos Porsche, which has its very own Hurley Haywood.
Not many dealers have a Hurley Haywood. But Brumos does, and it puts their Hurley Haywood to work: every Porsche new or used, he told us, gets taken around the block by the man who won the 24 Hours of Le Mans three times, the 24 Hours of Daytona five times, the man who drove the 1977 Daytona race for eight hours straight. And after he takes it around the block he'll smile, shake your hand -- and if you still have any doubts as to your newfound purchase, "I'm very good at closing," he says -- and then affix a sticker to the windshield: "This car has been personally driven and improved by Hurley Hayw
ood."
ood."
"What's your day-to-day like?" asked one journalist. "What do you do there?"
"I'm Hurley," said Hurley.
Hurley is Hurley, and Porsche is Porsche: a company that would drag one of its most legendary race car drivers from Barber Motorsports Park -- where he is the chief instructor of the Porsche Driving Experience -- to demonstrate its latest and greatest, the "sportiest crossover in the segment."
The Macan is the inevitable Porsche. Really! Depending on how your philosophy lies, the Macan -- a name that means "tiger" in Indonesian, because why not -- is either a cash grab from the most profitable car company in the world, a junior executive riding the coattails of the Cayenne's runaway success, or a brilliant leveraging of the Volkswagen Empire's parts catalog. (One-third of its platform is an Audi Q5 -- but the Macan is longer and lower.) In some way, it's all three. And in more ways than one, it's a vehicle that is far greater than the sum of its parts.
Porsche has the Macan S and the Macan Turbo, for now. The inevitable proliferation will follow: the Turbo S, the GTS, the Cabriolet, the Speedster. Wait, forget those last two. Turbo is a bit of a misnomer, however, as both engines are turbocharged -- twin turbocharged, in fact.
The difference between the Macan S and the Turbo is a little over half a liter: the S features a 3.0-liter twin-turbo V6, while the Turbo's V6 is 3.6 liters. That makes for 60 additional horsepower, from 340 to a nice even 400. That also makes for a 0-60 time in just 4.4 seconds. (If you option the Sport Chrono package, that is, which adds launch control.) In both vehicles the torque -- 339 lb-ft in the Macan S, 406 in the Turbo -- comes on at around 1,400 RPM to whenever the crankshaft flies out of the 38-lb one-piece stamped aluminum hood. (This is unlikely, but still entertaining to ponder.)
All Macans channel their power through PDK seven-speed transmissions, into all four wheels. Variable torque distribution and Porsche Traction Management vary power to the front, to the tune of 50 percent. Power almost always goes to the rear wheels, 295-width in back but just 265 up ahead. They whump and wallow over pavement like the sound of supermarket conveyor belts, their occasional squealing from outside muffled by the Cayenne-aping bodywork. Of course, maybe if you're driving a Macan to its tire-squealing limits, then somewhere in Leipzig -- where Porsche has sunk 500 million Euros into building the Macan -- an engineer will smile to himself knowing that his job, for now, is entirely secure.
Step into a Porsche Macan and you'll notice two things: one, the doors slam like those on old Benzes. Surely Germany has a series of codes regarding car door mechanisms as complex and authoritative as that of the oft-remarked Reinheitsgebot. Two, you'll notice that in front of you is, more or less, the same steering wheel as the 918 Spyder -- a wonderfully sculpted, narrow-diameter wheel of aluminum and leather that finally has buttons on it.Maybe you'll notice another thing. If the interior feels slightly cramped, blame the sloping center console that's as wide as an ironing board -- crammed with buttons that take two, three glances to figure out while on the move, a task the NHTSA surely abhors. What's jarring about a Porsche center console is not the amount of buttons but the parts where there are no buttons -- just dead, featureless blanks, reminding you that you should have bought $15,000 more in options. (At one point we drove a $104,000 Porsche Macan Turbo, which represented an eye-watering $40,000 increase over the base price. Such are the familiar travails of Porsche ownership.) On the way to Willow Springs Raceway, along the sinewy, dramatic Angeles Crest Highway, we came to the conclusion that perhaps no crossover deserves to be this competent -- but the Macan hustles through turns like it's shedding its 4,115-base curb weight. The steel spring suspension features MacPherson struts up front and a multilink rear; bumpy corners or roll never serve to fluster it. Porsche Active Suspension Management -- standard on the Turbo, but an option on the Macan S -- adds noticeable stability and enhance turn-in. (The optional air suspension, while useful for off-roading -- and more on that later -- adds a whole lot of indiscernible difference for $1,700.) It's easy to push the Macan into a smooth and gentle rhythm, spurred by excellent stability and relatively docile power delivery (in both cars), far less frantic and explosive than other turbocharged Porsches. The Macan S is quick, the Turbo ever so slightly quicker, the experience merely dialed up in the latter. Roadholding is excellent. Porsche Torque Vectoring works its computerized magic on these roads and these roads only, at a rate of speed reserved seemingly for teenage sons on their way back from prom, perhaps driving by themselves with a full head of vitriol. Concerned fathers should choose their power outputs according to their gut instincts.
The brakes, six pistons up front, per disc, and one poor lonely piston in back, are the letdown in this concerto of heightened competence. With nearly 2 inches of squishy pedal feel, they feel hardly adequate to reign in that much weight; the Macan S and Turbo both stop with no roll, no squat, no drama -- and no feel.
But its communicative, lightweight steering, coupled with the new wheel, felt even better than the steering in the Cayman, which was merely heavy for heft's sake. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Is this sacrilege?
Perhaps. It helps to justify the Macan with the idea that it isn't so much a tall, tiny SUV as it is a wagon. Yes, a wagon. A Sport Wagen, if you prefer to label it. It's a Cayman wearing a backpack that's been toned down bit.
Until the part where it's not.That part, incidentally, lies in the dirt.
Porsche took us to Willow Springs not just to turn laps, but to do a bit of surprisingly serious off-roading, more as a theoretical exercise than anything else. The Macan has up to 9 inches of ground clearance, abetted by an air suspension; maximum approach and departure angles of 26.6 and 25.3 degrees, respectively; electronic locking rear differential and optional skid plates. And yet it has a single button, on that mile-wide center console, which says "Off-Road;" that's that taken care of, then. Such overengineering seems typically German: on the off-chance that one certifiably lackadaisical Macan buyer might attempt to tackle the long way to Las Vegas, then they deserve the best.
Leading away from the Streets of Willow Springs, our convoy of air-suspended Macans followed a scraggly dirt path that soon ran into deep ruts and drops, then a soaring uphill that filled the windshield with blue sky. It seemed insurmountable. Just step on the throttle, we were told by a disembodied voice on the other end of a Motorola. And we watched the Macans in front scramble for traction, their rear ends tilting sideways, tires scurrying nervously and throwing clouds of dirt our way as the sensors tried to figure it all out.
When it was our turn, we accidentally cut the throttle just as we rolled over the ridge -- a four-wheeling faux pas for the ages, a defeat liberated from the laws of victory. A good minute or so of wheelspin ensued. Our heads bounced like mosh pit amateurs.
But true to the computer, the rear end settled in, then dug, then hauled us forward with our throttle mashed, and our Macan stormed victoriously up the hill like we were hunting colonial Spaniards. Cheers, whoops, shouts and celebratory swigs of water all around. Not a single vehicle in our modest convoy got stuck.
We climbed about 150 feet overlooking Willow Springs Raceway, then parked on a plateau. Below us were all three racetracks: Streets of Willow in front, Horse Thief Mile below us, Big Willow to our right. The wind whipped in howls. Past Big Willow a Nissan 350Z drifted lazily around a squat green building, a smoky white plume of smoke tailing it, the sound of its screaming engine in second gear piercing through the wind. We painstakingly turned the Macans around and pressed the Hill Descent Control, which works in the same way as its Adaptive Cruise Control: set it to any speed, between 2 to 18 mph, and you'll coast down the hill in an unnerving shout of gronks and grinds. We aimed at 3 mph, the blood rushing to our foreheads, and scurried down the hill at a rate now considered delicate.
Off-roading in a Macan, then, is of the computer-controlled variety -- just point the nose at an obstacle, press all the right buttons, and stomp on the throttle. The computers will take care of the rest. That's luxury four-wheeling for you: the guiding principle that with electronics taking care of the messy bits, even your cute, compact luxo-cruiser can take on what a Jeep Cherokee can if you're willing to tear up the clearcoat.
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In fact, that's rather what you can say about the Macan in general -- over-engineered and over-competent, like hiring Conan the Barbarian to hang a picture frame. There's some satisfaction derived in knowing that your car can climb a mountain, that it can break the law five times over on public roads, that it won't break a piston ring while doing so; it speaks to that all-American desire to have it all, to know that you could. The could is the dream worth paying for. It's a case where the engineering meets the marketing message, and nothing else needs to be said. If hallowed and purist Porsche has to build an anathematic compact crossover, we'd expect them to build nothing less competent.
Before we headed back down Angeles Crest Highway, we spun a few laps on track. It was a silly exercise, but perhaps they all are; it told us the same things that the drive through the mountains had. The Macan S is adequately quick, the Turbo more so. On the back straight of Streets of Willow, the Macan S averaged 83 mph behind the pace car. In the Turbo, we averaged 11 mph faster.
But then, Hurley Haywood bid us to climb into a Macan Turbo, the very $104,000 Turbo. "This is how it goes," said America's greatest endurance racer as he unwound the wheel into the Streets of Willow. Haywood still has the very first car to wear the Brumos stripes: the 917/10 from the 1973 Can-Am season, his first in an open cockpit, coming in third behind Donohue and Follmer. The 918 Spyder Weissach Package Haywood has on order will wear the same livery. In his hands the Macan is composed, lively, blindingly quick. We hit 102 mph on the back straight. Haywood, of course, doesn't say a word. "Though sometimes we can't get him to shut up," said his Barber coworkers.
"Not bad, Hurley," quipped a journalist as we pulled into the pits, gently as ever. "Now let's do that for 24 more hours."
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