Aston Vantage vs Ferrari and Porsche: Has Britain won the super-GT showdown? | Autocar

The Ferrari and Aston Martin have neither, yet their drivers need longer to gel with either car. They also lack the Turbo’s seat-of-pants feel, which is akin to a reassuring embrace in the Wild West of 600bhp-plus GTs.

So you begin to get stuck into the 911 with some relish. The process starts by rotating the drive mode selector, nestled against the airbag cover, from Normal to Sport Plus.

This brings the powertrain to the boil, but you must then dial the dampers back into their relaxed state via the dash-mounted toggle: anything else is too firm on British country roads.

In any case, so genetically nailed down is this frog-eyed assassin that you need to allow every last ounce of verve to escape in the form of body movements.

Such is the Porsche’s immense transparency and your faith in its predictability that you also have no qualms peeling back the ESP – not entirely off, but halfway. And now the 911 Turbo S is ready to blow your mind.

And it does, finding total traction and unrelenting thrust in such improbable places that you spend half the time holding on, waiting for the nose to rise up off the road.

It never happens, the car instead remaining contained, precise and freakishly absorptive – and, yes, still a little bemused by your efforts. Herein lies the conceptual blindspot of the 911 Turbo: driven at seven-tenths, it has spellbinding accuracy and purity.

It is richly rewarding simply to be at the controls, but it is unremittingly locked down. Then, driven at a mad-eyed nine-tenths, you’re subjected to stupefying forces that should not exist in the context of an urbane super-sports model with CarPlay and Isofix. 

In these moments the Turbo starts to exhibit a sublimely mischievous dynamism otherwise kept well hidden. You can see the problem, though: at the crucial eight-tenths point the Turbo is peculiarly inexpressive.

There’s no question that the Porsche is the quickest car here, but if the aim of group tests is to learn what one car can reveal about another, its presence amounts to more than a predictable conclusion regarding outright pace.