Hi everyone,
Last weekend I took our Macan Turbo to a PCA autocross event in Marina, CA. It was my first autocross and I had a lot of fun. For those who don't want to read on, I'll cut to the chase: while I had a few reservations (primarily centered around weight and front tire wear), my expectations were high and they were exceeded!
Here are my specs that matter:
2015 Macan Turbo
21” clodhoppers, Pirelli tires
PSE
AS (and PASM of course)
Sport Chrono
Tires
I learned all kinds of things about the car and I'll share them below. Firstly, the car generates a lot of grip, considering what it is (the -1.1 longitudinal max is braking):
The track was a concrete taxiway at an airport, with (obviously) good traction. That said, the Pirellis weren’t as terrible as I feared they may be - it is roughly an 11 year old design - and felt tacky to the touch after a few runs. The tire wear wasn’t bad after 12 full runs for the day, and was nearly equal front to rear (probably thanks to the pressure adjustments described below).
The second pleasant surprise was that I was able to achieve a neutral chassis balance by adjusting tire pressures. My baseline was the standard 36/39 f/r cold. The car understeered a bit too much so I kept dropping rear pressures until the balance became satisfactory. I ended up at about 40/32 f/r hot, which is probably 36/28 cold. That is a big 11psi drop in the rear and I was a little concerned about peeling a tire off the rim, but it was fine.
Differential
I could not get the car to rotate under braking (which is not necessarily a problem, but can be used to deal with on-throttle understeer). The good news is that if you're strategic with the throttle, the car doesn't understeer under power anyway! I found that by bleeding power on at the apex (no more than 15% initially, then progressively increase to 100% once the car rotated a bit), I could finish off the corners in a very mild 4 wheel drift pretty consistently. I think that the ABD brake differential was at play here. I don’t have PTV+. Considering the huge amount of weight transfer on acceleration (see pic below), which should create understeer, I can only imagine how much work the inside rear brake had cut out for it, as evidenced by a LOT of rear wheel brake dust at the end of the day. Whatever it is, it works, and the Macan’s physics-defying part-throttle rotation is a neat trick that really helps the car around the track.
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I could not feel the torque being sent to the front wheels, per se, but I was doling out more power than any two rear tires could handle on their own and wasn't getting a lot of wheelspin, so there was definitely a good amount of torque going to the front.
Transmission and Suspension
I ran with stability control off, in Sport Plus, with the transmission in auto from the first session and never changed it. In auto, the transmission chooses the same gear I would 97% of the time and chooses gears that I would not have been able to find the paddle for several times per lap (note how crossed over my hands are in the video). I know that I could use the stick shift on the console but Porsche’s “forward for upshift, back for downshift” strategy always baffles me.
Body roll was present and accounted for in all axes, but the dampers are firm and there was no extra movement after the chassis settled. This is not a race car, but its composure is faultless.
I used Launch Control at the start of many of the runs. The first corner approaches fast and the car is probably traveling at 45-50mph by the time I have to cut the throttle, so whatever advantage LC provides is short lived. My guess is that it’s worth a tenth or so.
Brakes
Not much to talk about here. They worked fine, no fade, and provided enough feel for me to stay out of ABS when I wanted to.
Results
So we know that the lateral grip numbers are great, the balance is good, and of course it has 400 horsepower. So how did she do? There were about 50 cars there, and the top five or so had racing slicks or “barely legal” DOT race tires. Race tires are everything, so if we throw those results out the window, the Macan’s 34.553 lap time almost certainly would have been Top Ten and maybe even Top Five (the results will be in later this week). That’s right, faster than almost every 911/Turbo/GTS, Cayman or Boxster/S/GTS, and within a few tenths of the GT3s and one every fast Cayman S! I’ll post the results when I get them.
AND...I made all of my runs with the child seat strapped in, which I think makes the Macan the overall winner.
General Comments
Everyone that said anything to me was impressed by the Macan. I heard things like
“we’re all getting embarrassed by an SUV” and
“Porsche should be paying you for making its brand look good”, and
”Wow...and it has a child seat!”. Pretty fun times.
I made several runs with a passenger, which added about 2/10ths of a second each time. If we extrapolate that data we could improve times by 1 second if the car lost 1,000lbs of weight!
Complaints
Are you kidding? It’s a 4,500lb SUV that hung with the big boys at an autocross event.
This thing is proof positive that you CAN have your cake and eat it too.
So without further ado, here are the videos. I am sorry in advance about the wind noise - there was probably a 20mph crosswind the whole day and we were required to roll the windows down.
https://youtu.be/1i0uNPxC01o
Here’s a full run from outside the car. You can hear a little wheelspin on the hard launch. I don’t think any car out there got off the line like the Macan.
https://youtu.be/EWTelXu2E-M
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