Every time I drive a car other than my own I realize how much I absolutely adore my car. After driving my Dad's Porsche 911 Carrera on a 150 mile journey through mountains, I'm left oddly unsatisfied by the car. While its luxury is orders of magnitudes higher than my car's, the performance just isn't there. It's sad.
My car out performs a stock Carrera. In a straight line, it takes the lead quick and slowly keeps on crawling ahead through the gears. Not even the legendary PDK dual-clutch transmission can save it. In the corners though, the fat Porsche on its luxury suspension feels like navigating a cruise ship through a mountain pass, I'm just left stunned at how quintessentially 'sport car' the Carrera is, but it handles like a station wagon. Example: changing lanes. In the Carrera, you get a nice cushy lean to one side as you start the turn, then a gentle rock back to center as you complete it. The car has serious body roll. Not SUV bad, but for a sports car, egregious. My car has absolutely no body roll doing the same maneuver. You feel exclusively lateral forces. To get notable body roll out of the car, you're taking the turn to the extent of the tires' grip. That might not sound too special to someone who doesn't drive sports cars all the time, but it's loving beautiful to be able to point your car where you want to go and it goes there as if you hadn't turned at all.
Then there's the GT-R, everyone's favorite track devourer. Straight line, no competition. The GT-R will annihilate my car and any others in a hundred mile radius. Around corners, the four wheel drive and stiff suspension will carry you through turns at rocket speeds. But, there's two major things that drive me crazy about the GT-R: body roll and what I'll call car personality. I'll start with body roll because it's simple, the car rotates laterally when you turn. It's a heavy pig and feels like it, despite the sport suspension. It's a weird sensation though because you can go screaming around a turn feeling like the car might flip at three times the posted suggested speed, but the car still grips like a monster and claws through the turn. My car at an equal speed would have very little body roll, but it'd slide right off the damn road. Anyway, the second point is car personality. The car feels like it was made to make the average person able to drive on a racetrack. Everything feels padded, like the car answers to itself first and then you. Or like you're merely making suggestions on how it should drive. For example, you put your foot down and the car will pretend you didn't for like 300-500ms before realizing it should start going. The steering wheel is light and has very little road response. The turbo lag drives me loving nuts as a NA guy, but tell you what the second those things spool up you go from accelerating fast to holy stuff is this a rocket ship? My car's no Dodge Viper, but it's got a personality. The steering wheel is hefty so you can feel the resistance of the tires against the turn, and you can feel how much grip you have left until you start to slide. Not super heavy, but usually requires a whole arm movement to turn as opposed to pushing it around with a finger. You put your foot down and the car is excited to accompany with all the power you requested. Downshifting isn't a suggestion, it's a command. It does what you do when you do it, and it's exhilarating to drive.
Wow, that turned into a blog post really fast. I was just thinking about how much I enjoy my car and it turned into a whole brown townysis. Whoops.
TL;DR - I love my car. It might not be the fastest out there, or the most fancy, but holy stuff does it put a smile on my face every time I drive.
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