911 Dakar @ Tremblant.

Last week, in the fading warmth of summer, the fallen leaves carpeting the tapestric Laurentians, I ventured towards Eastern’s Canada’s premiere ski resort. Having never been to Mont Tremblant, and with a day to spare on my way back from New York,ⁱ I was keen to see if the “Whistler of Quebec” was all it’s cracked up to be.ⁱⁱ Certainly it had world-class amenities on paper, but could it blend these ingredients into something to compete with my beloved Rockies? For the occasion of this “neutral”ⁱⁱⁱ investigation, I called-up my go-to rental car guys to arrange one of their newest Porsches:

The 2023 911 Dakar aka. Stuttgart’s first all-terrain sports car.^iv

Taking delivery of the $350,000^v “Roughroader”^vi in front of the comme-il-faut Ritz Carleton Montreal,^vii – the car’s retro-inspired livery^viii cheekily breaking the fourth wall of seriousness – I grabbed the keys, hopped into the LWBs,^ix and twisted the stub to the left of the steering wheel. The 473 HP flat-six friZZZZed to life, its cackling exhaust demonotonising the late morning commute.

Pulling away from the valet – towards ski slopes, golf courses, and race tracks of the northern retreat – the Dakar and I gripped and grappled first through the city and past the fall semester students at nearby McGill University. This was surely an opportunity to temperature check this most outrageous of ass-engined “Nazi” slotcars, n’est pas? But the actual impact of this lifted 911 on the impressionable youf of today? Well, as far as I could see, the Dakar elicited precisely naught-point-naught papp pics on that dense October morning! (Though to be fair to the car, this was also essentially ground zero of the “Queers For Palestine” movement starting October 8th last year, so maybe we can’t be all that surprised. Let’s just say we have different priorities.)

Unperturbed, zip-zapping upwards through Île-de-Montreal across road surfaces that wouldn’t look out of place in, ahem, Senegal 50 years ago(!), the Dakar and I bobbled and shredded our way towards Highway A15, wondering how on earth anyone with an Audi RS5 nevermind a Ferrari 812 managed these hideous cracks and heaves at anything above 20 kph without exploding tires and cracking rims.^x Which surely means that the Dakar was the perfect tool for this tragicomically demanding job? The ultimate embodiment of Late Capitalism, Conspicuous Consumption, and our Gravel Road Future? Let’s see!

For starters, the looks! We’re aesthetically-driven creatures, after all (no matter how much post-modernism tries to crush our spirits and convince us of the contrary), and I have to say that, unlike those keffiya’d Gen Zers, I’m largely a fan. The Dakar has strong road presence, approachable dimensions, and sits confidently on its chunky tires beneath its unpainted wheel arches, certainly as well as any of the aftermarket “Safari” before it. The interior is familiar if not exactly dripping in quality, but it certainly feels appropriate for a $150,000 – 200,000 CAD car, which is exactly what a base 911 goes for. Of course, this is a “limited edition” but much of the added “value” evidently goes directly to the numbered plaque on the dash, at least in terms of touchpoints.

Blessedly, the underpinnings captured more of the “surplus” otherwise slurped up by VW’s increasingly cobwebbed coffers. Jacked-up 80mm using stiffer springs, softer and more responsive Bilstein Damptronic X shocks, and the double-wishbone front control arms from the pointy new 992 GT3, the net result was, well, at least unique? On urban roads, the ride quality could never be confused for a car with air suspension; the shorter wheelbase and greater polar moment yielding a less-than-comfortable amount of pitching and yawing across the vertiginous city streets. The steel brakes also squealed like Tim Walz hugging one of his own kind.^xi And these were the stock pads! Not exactly Ferodo DS3.12…^xii

Out on the highway, the wind noise and tire noise were within tolerable ranges, and the 3.0L twin-turbo engine was actually proving more characterful than I’d expected (if about exactly as punchy as expected) but the curious droniness of the lightened, hollowed, “modern” 992 cabin^xiii soon began to grate on my nerves. This, to the point that the merely adequate ($7k!) Burmeister sound system was readily foregone in favour of my 10-year-old Bose QC35 over-ear noise-cancelling headphones for the duration of the 150km journey north.

Listening to Rudyard retell the Aryan Invasion,^xiv Gibbon describe Theodoric’s exploits, and Berneron recount his Desmosedici-fueled life story, the Dakar and I cruised past Saint-Jérôme and into Sante-Agathe-des-Monts where A15 merges with 117. Without any particular itinerary in mind, we navigated straight around the outside of the town towards Circuit Mont-Tremblant, paying pilgrimage to the most revered race track in the region. It was closed for the season, but at least it was clear to see why it has such famously restrictive track noise levels (92 dB!). It’s literally across the street from the cute little hillside village.

Venturing beyond in search of driving roads, it didn’t take long to find a series of lumpy and bumpy secondary stretches that were satisfyingly quiet at this post-golf-season / pre-ski-season time of year. With only a few locals oot and aboot, the Dakar and I had basically free range of the winding lakeside passes surrounding Lac Tremblant. Quebec is graced with a lot of these kinds of roads: twisting and turning with considerable and relatively severe elevation changes, meaning seriously demanding compressions and rebounds on any would-be sports car’s suspension. Certainly the Challenger SRT8 I hammered out on these surfaces a few years ago was woefully out of sorts, unable as it was to manage the technical and heavily(!) frost-heaved surfaces. With all the midrange punch you’d expect from the modern-turbo mill, the Dakar’s 295/40/20 Pirelli tires and additional wheel travel were just about the ideal pairing to this particular entrée. No matter how rough the terrain, I never had to worry about bottoming-out or being left stranded with a flat. And while I have a certain amount of lust after the new back-seat-enabled 992.2 GT3 Touring,^xv I don’t see how it would be any match for the Dakar on roads like these at this time of year, nevermind in the winter… so is this “Roughroader” perfect for 21st century P-car collectors?

Not quite… The electric power steering and knobby all-terrain tires deprive the driver of much in the way of feel or feedback, which is to say confidence and fun. The plus-side of this is that the helm doesn’t buck out of your grip as you muscle around the (third-world) countryside, but the down-side is that you also don’t have much sense of available grip. Another minus of the Dakar is the transmission. While the 8-speed PDK is certainly quick enough, it’s not a very good listener, which is to say that even in its sportier modes, it changes gears entirely of its own accord, and not necessarily where you’d want it to.

For reasons far better understood by Eurocrats and its related class of babysitting overlords, the Dakar is mostly unwilling to get anywhere near the 7`500 RPM redline. Not that it “needs” to be revved that high to be enjoyed, but subservience is a necessary and desirable quality of any instrument, which means Porsche’s PDK programming here is actually more of Freudian slip as to what this object really is and the kind of cuckolded capitalist spreadsheet-drunk-dazzler its designed for. The incessant and literally unstoppable beeping of the parking sensors while driving along ATV trails in the Dakar only cemented this interpretation.

As I came off the secondary roads and tootled into town, cruising past the surprisingly retail-strip-mall-cum-disneyland-feeling Mont Tremblant^xvi towards the valet to at the 5-star Hotel Quintessence, I entered the restaurant and spent a few hours staring out the oversized windows past the gilded trees across the lake beyond. As the tasteful Old Fashioned washed down some of the best homemade bread and butter in recent memory, I considered the car that’d brought me there. It’s expensive and limited, but also meets the market where it is. It’s eye-catching and ear-catching, but doesn’t take orders well enough. It’s compliant, but too bobbly. It’s fast, but never really that fizzy.

For this kind of adventure and these kinds of roads, perhaps a J1.2 Taycan Cross Turismo with its improved range could’ve executed the same daytrip with similar backroads smiles smirks, even more highway cruisability, and nearly as much curbside panache (in a bright colour), but when it comes to combustion-engined choices – and in this price bracket given a bizarro world defined evermore by mere ticker price rather than lasting value – I guess this is as good as it gets. I’m not sure how happy that realisation should make us…^xvii but at the very least it should make us appreciate what we already have that much more.

And for that, we thank you, Mr. Dakar.

1. After a decade of openly despising New Rome New Yawk, I can now tolerate it well enough without much fuss, just so long I don’t make too much of a schedule. The joy of the city (to yours truly, at this particular chapter in life at least) is in the flâneuring (if Taleb hasn’t ruined that word); wandering between visits with artist friends (113 and Han this trip), museums and galleries (Met, Met, Met!), peerlessly aristocratic lunches (The Grill @ Seagram), and most avowedly not in trying to tick tourist boxes while fighting traffic seething with tens of millions of other sight-seers not to mention residents. ↩
2. Not that driving fast cars on twisting roads was the reason for my layover in Montreal, that was merely a positive byproduct of wanting to visit my now-96-year-old grandfather, who always appreciates the visit! Even when I show up in a gauche Roller. ↩
3. Of course, per the ever-incisive Agnes Callard, neutrality can only ever be a starting point, not an end-point (emphasis added):
   

   Neutrality describes how you act when you are ignorant on a matter that you, as a leader, really ought to have knowledge about, and you acknowledge this rather than pretending otherwise. Neutrality is not acceptable as a response to injustice, except temporarily. We remain neutral when we do not know what to do, and while we work out how to become the people who do. I would classify neutrality in the way that Aristotle classifies shame: the half-virtue of the learner. It makes no more sense to pride oneself on being neutral than to pride oneself on feeling ashamed.

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4. At least in terms of production variants, the 992.1 Dakar is the “first.” Of course its spiritual predecessor is the competition-only 953 that won the legendary Paris-Dakar in 1984.

   

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5. $CAD. Retail. And really not that far off that today, 12 months after release. ↩
6. Indeed, not writing “Rothmans” is exactly as offensive and gay as you’d expect. For chrissake, someone please tell Stuttgart: smoking is cool again! ↩
7. If you’re staying in Montreal and looking for the 5-star experience, skip the Four Seasons and head straight to the Ritz. ↩
8. Though perhaps the optional Martini livery is encore plus charmant? ↩
9. Lightweight buckets are the absolute worst choice for this car. 18-way comfort seats are the way to go because they have heating, lumbar support, and side bolster adjustments, all of which make them 10x better for road trips of even modest duration. ↩
10. Honestly the “pedestrian impact regulation theory” of SUV adoption is no longer entirely sufficient to explain the death of the sedan across the west — we now have a categorical imperative to include the Third-Worlding of the West in our analysis. ↩
11. Not sure where your mind went with that, but the sheer variety of possible thoughts crossing your mind should be pretty persuasive as to this Manchurian Candidate’s bonafides, to say nothing of his (in)ability to go toe-to-toe with Xi, Putin, MBS, or even the tired old windbags at the local knitting club:

    

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12. Like I had on my old R35. ↩
13. You don’t like hollow cabins? Blame Porscheflation! ↩
14. Rudyard is at his best when you also have the visuals to go along with, but the History 102 audio podcasts certainly work in a pinch:

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15. Though perhaps not at $350k CAD new! Yikes… this Ukraine war really is killing ze germans more than anyone is seriously admitting. It’s really not just that Porsche is openly trying to tear a page out of the LVMH playbook, though that’s certainly part of it, it’s that a deindustrialising country with soaring energy prices whose neighbours (eg. Poland, Hungary, Czechia) are now divesting of relatively inexpensive car component manufacturing in favour of geopolitically-essential military systems procurement, and therefore simply cannot keep prices under control the way they used to. So ya, expect price increases of ~10% compounding annually for any car coming out of Germany for the foreseeable future, which means that a $165k 992.1 GT3 in 2022 becomes a $220k 992.2 GT3 in 2025. It’s bang on. But it definitely starts to make itself felt by customers in the $200-300k range… that used to be entry-level Ferrari money in very recent memory!

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16. Don’t let this photo fool you, Mont Tremblant is much less impressive than Whistler and basically on par with Rabbit Hill.

    

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17. Old man alert! ↩