What I'm driving this weekend

I have a confession to make: I am the only automotive journalist on the planet who has never driven a Porsche 911.

Okay, "never' isn't entirely accurate. I've taken a 911 out on a track for a spin (figuratively, not literally), and way back in my What Car? Magazine days, another intern and I took a 911 to get it gassed and washed. (One of us accidentally turned on the defroster in the car wash, filling the inside of the car with condensation which we frantically wiped up with about 4,000 paper napkins. That story has remained untold until now.) And Basem let me drive his beautiful 1983 911SC (which has since shuffled off this mortal coil; not my fault).

Regardless, the fact is that I left most of our Porsche reviews up to freelancer Philip Powell, so I've never spent a full week with a Porsche 911 that I could (temporarily) call my own. Until now.

"My" Porsche is a brown (brown? oy) 2008 911 Carrera, basically the base-model Porsche -- if you can call something with 345 horsepower, a 0-60 time of 4.7 seconds and a $75,000 price tag a base model. The plan is to show off like crazy to my friends, and then, once they are sick of me, drive the 911 out to Las Vegas where I'm doing a speech on what's coming in the 2009 model year. After that, I'm jetting off to exotic Utah to drive the updated 2009 911. Hopefully, I will have racked up enough seat time in the '08 to appear as if I know what I'm talking about. -- Aaron Gold

Photo © Aaron Gold