Porsche has been tinkering with active aerodynamics for decades, adding driver-adjustable wings to race cars as long ago as the 1950s in the 550 Spyder era. Porsche was the first manufacturer employing it on a street car with automatically lowering suspension on the 1986 959 supercar to help reduce lift at speed. Even its most basic Porsche sports cars, like my 1997 Boxster have an automatically deploying spoiler. It’s no surprise, then, that the new 992-generation Turbo S has Porsche’s most advanced active aero setup of all time. With grille shutters, a front splitter, and a rear wing that can change the car’s aerodynamic profile depending on which mode the driver has selected, speed, and even weather, this is an incredibly advanced system that makes this Porsche’s prodigious speed manageable.
In the video below you’ll be able to see the full extent of the aero package.
The grille shutters can close off the frontal area to help make the car more aerodynamically smooth and efficient. This is a factor of the car’s water temperature, speed, and driving mode. If you’re in Sport mode or Sport Plus, you’ll need all the cooling air you can cram through the radiators.
The front lip is tucked away for efficient normal driving, but deploys one step in Sport mode, and a further step in Sport Plus. This helps provide balanced downforce to the front of the car, making those front tires stick better through the corners. If you’re in maximum attack trying to get the most out of your driving experience, you want all the downforce you can get.
The rear wing is more active than it ever has been. If you remember back to the 996 Turbo, that little wing just popped up and down with speed and that’s it. Now it has several modes of deployment, and even changes in angle of attack to provide more shove to the rear axle. It can be tucked away for maximum efficiency, or it can deploy a little bit in Sport mode. If you click over to Sport Plus, it pops up further into the clean air, and it sharply angles forward to grab more air.
Not only that, but both the front and rear aero can max deploy very quickly under braking to act as a little bit of an air brake to whoa the car down from speed even quicker.
Most interesting to me, however, was the car’s rain-mode aero adjustments. Pull the front aero and slam as much aero as possible on the rear of the car to manage weight over the rear axle. Genius.
It may not be as sexy as the active aero on something like a McLaren, but it’s functional and efficient, which has been Porsche’s touchstone for decades!