Discover the Porsche 911 S/T and Dakar, two extreme takes on the iconic 911. We compare their performance, usability, and driving experience to see which one stands out.

The limited edition Porsche 911 S/T and Dakar offer diametrically opposed takes on the 911 theme. But which, if either, is the best 911 of the modern era? Andrew Frankel finds out

It is a rule of thumb I grant, but one to which I very much adhere. When a manufacturer makes a new model range, replete with the requisite mind-boggling number of variants in terms of body configuration, engine size and type,number of driven wheels and so on, it doesn’t just sit down and design several dozen cars side by side. It makes one. A core product, from which all the others are then spun.

Which is why so often the sweet spot in a range can be found not with the fastest, nor most expensive model on offer, but something far more basic. So the rule is that if you can find that car, you’ll have found the best car in the range, because it’s the one on which all the money has been spent, the hub if you like, spiralling out from which are multitudinous spokes leading to the satellite products, all orbiting the mothership.

Take the Porsche 911. As regulars will know, I’m running a base Carrera at present, the only 911 you can now buy for a five-figure sum, and the more time I spend in it, the more convinced of its essential brilliance I become.

Of course anyone can buy one, but it will likely mean sourcing one that’s been flipped, turned around with undignified haste by its first owner in the hope of making many thousands of fast bucks. But even in this rarefied atmosphere, that game is not what it was, at least so far as the Dakar is concerned. On PistonHeads, Dakar prices asked for delivery miles cars not extra’d up to the gullet float around the £200,000 mark, which when you consider that any deal will likely transact at a number beginning with a ‘1’ and the likely option spend on even a lightly specified car, it means they’re probably not actually costing their second owners much more than their first.

The S/T, for now at least, is a different prospect, with some truly mad figures – close to half a million quid – currently being asked. Whether that is anywhere near what is actually achieved is another question, but does illustrate quite well why Porsche in the US will only sell an S/T to its new owner after he or she has first leased it from them for a year. You can’t flip a car you don’t own.

But briefly to recap: behind the name and accessories, the Porsche 911 Dakar is essentially a Carrera 4 GTS Allroad and it is possible there are people in Stuttgart who’ll now never speak to me again for calling it that. But the formula of longer travel suspension, raised ride height and hybrid on/off road rubber is not exactly new – it’s just never been done like this before. The powertrain is standard GTS, which means a 473bhp twin-turbo, 3-litre flat-six, with four-wheel drive, no manual option but double-skinned Pirelli Scorpion All Terrain Plus Tyres as standard, though conventional summer and winter tyres are available too.

The load limits of those Pirellis reduce the top speed to 149mph, yet despite their weight plus that of the new suspension, mass relative to the all-wheel drive GTS actually drops 40kg to 1605kg thanks to various lightweighting such as the CFRP bonnet from the GT3, deleted rear seats, an ultra-light rear wing and the smaller brakes from the Carrera S. Goodies such as active anti-roll bars and rear-wheel steering are standard.

The S/T on the other hand can be seen to have far greater legitimacy, not to mention incomparably more purity of purpose. A car combining GT3 RS power with even less mass, and specifically tuned for no purpose other than to be as good to drive as a 992 can be. Not on a track – another environment more such cars are imagined to visit than actually do – but on the public road. It’s beautiful, very understated and designed purely to be driven. It is the kind of car people like me have been crying out for.

But up to this point, we’ve not driven either yet. So let’s saddle up and see where they take us.

But on Michelin Cup 2 tyres, you simply daren’t press on too hard in such conditions. Because it wasn’t also cold, the rubber could actually generate quite high levels of both longitudinal and lateral adhesion, but when they started to go, their breakaway characteristics were somewhat sudden. No delicious progressive slides, there to be joyously ridden out on the throttle, just slip, skid, save. Why, on a car it describes explicitly as so optimised for road use they’ve not even set a lap time in it, has Porsche decided to fit track day tyres? It makes no sense in such a car to push the limit so far away that it’s all but inaccessible on public roads that are dry, while lending the car a somewhat spiky persona on those that are not. Were I to be blessed with such a car, job one would be to find some rubber that sacrificed some of the grip I’d neither want nor need, for the right not to be scared every time it rained.

So the choice between them is not as clear cut as that, and becomes considerably less so when I drive the Porsche 911 Dakar not in Africa, but Wales. My fear about this car was also tyre related: that those double-skinned, ultra-tough Scorpions would have ride-wrecking qualities over here and that they’d present the flip side of the problem already demonstrated by the S/T: namely that they’d have so little grip, the rhythm and flow of your journey from place to place would be at best limited, at worst interrupted by the constant need to make allowances for them, not only in corners, but under braking too.

But actually? No. During the course of this test, I set out to discover just how much g-force the Dakar will generate on its off-road tyres, and the answer is over 1g whether you are accelerating, braking, turning left or right. Which strikes me as plenty.

On the contrary, it is such an easy car just to go and have fun in. Of course the S/T is substantially more powerful and a lot lighter, but so wildly at variance are the respective characters of their engines that not only does the Dakar have more torque, it actually also has the better torque-to-weight ratio too, and it’s all there at 2300rpm, fully 4000rpm earlier on the dial than the S/T. And because torque-to-weight is what you feel when you accelerate, the Dakar feels just as rapid as the S/T at most normal road speeds.

And it doesn’t seem to matter very much to the Dakar what the conditions may be underfoot. Because it is softly suspended and its tyres heavily treaded, the drop off in tyre performance and progression between wet and dry found on the S/T barely exists in the Dakar. You just turn on the wipers and keep going, knowing that any loss of adhesion will be signalled in letters ten feet tall. And even then you’ll probably not pay much attention because you know how gentle – and fun – the Dakar can be on the limit. You can, of course, turn it into ‘Rallye’ mode and shuttle 75 per cent of engine torque to the rear wheels, but even if you forget, it drifts around on the throttle so easily and consistently you’ll be wondering how much more fun you can actually have in a modern 911 on a public road.

The answer is provided by the S/T, the moment it dries out enough for those Michelins to get into their operational window. And then? The most profoundly satisfying driving experience afforded by any 911 (View 911 Buyers Guide) of the 991 and 992 series, with the only possible exception of this car’s true father, the 10kg lighter 2016 911 R. The powertrain is superlative: hitching the GT3 RS motor to such super-short ratios is nothing less than a masterstroke, enabling you to keep the revs exactly where you want them while your arm slashes that short-throw stick around its superbly well-defined and oiled gate. And even though the sheer speed means these occasions don’t exactly last very long, while they do there is a kind of exquisite mania I don’t recall from any other modern sports car on sale. Thank three pedals and a naturally aspirated engine sourced straight from a racing car for that..

But the chassis is actually better. This is the only 911 with double wishbone suspension at one end that is not paired with rear-wheel steering at the other. And while I am told the springs and dampers are the same as those on the GT3, I am also given to understand that the tuning of the latter, as well as the steering, was a process that took many months to complete. It shows.

You may recall me questioning why the 992 GT3 Touring had the same suspension settings as the bewinged standard GT3 and considering it an opportunity lost. Now I know what’s possible, I think that even more. That harshness, that uncompromising attitude to small imperfections in the road surface? All gone. The irony is that the most expensive, eclectic and rare Motorsport-developed 911 of the current generation is also the most accessible. On a truly great road all those distractions, those moments when you rather wish you weren’t being jiggled about quite so much, have vanished. What’s left is simple, honest to goodness fun. It actually feels quite old school in this regard, albeit with modern levels of poise, and all the better for it. It reduces and concentrates all we want a car to be in such an environment into a single shot of absolute, pure driving pleasure.

And the Dakar should rise again too, albeit shorn of its accessories but retaining the suspension travel and chunky tyres as the ‘Dakar Pack’ option on the configurator of a standard 911. Bet they’d sell plenty of those too.

So let’s return to the beginning and the contention with which this story began. Both these cars are so far from the core 911 offering, and proceed from there in such diametrically opposed directions it seemed implausible that both could still somehow get it right. And yet they do, the S/T being the best driving 911 of its generation, the Dakar by being the most usable, and in a very real-world sense that doesn’t involve sand dunes the size of office blocks. That is the magic of the 911.

Which would I choose? As the recreation it so clearly is and for those who really understand driving, the S/T is untouchable. Inviolate. Extraordinary. In the fantasy automotive aircraft hangar in my garden, the S/T would have pride of place, first in the queue by the door, just waiting for the right time and weather to get out there and let rip.

But you could spend a day searching its darkest reaches and never find a Dakar, for I could never consider having such a car in such a place. Why? Because it would be parked outside the front door of my house, covered in mud and road grime, ready for me come rain or shine. It would be doing what 911s have always done best: providing maximum driving pleasure in the most usable form possible. It’s the quality that has ensured those three numbers remained glued to the sloping back of the world’s greatest sports car for the last six decades.

Make no mistake: if you want a winner here, it’s the S/T hands down, a car that will live for all time in the pantheon of great 911s. The Dakar will never be so fêted. But money aside and forced to choose just one, I’d actually take a de-badged Dakar (appearance turned down as far as I could get it on the configurator) and drive it every single day of my life. Ultimately and to me at least, it is what a 911 is for. Make of that what you will.