It’s a 30C morning so scorching that the air above the asphalt is already waving, but, from the deep cockpit of an Agate Grey Porsche 911 Carrera S, the road feels so slippery it could be coated with ice. A bit too much gas and I’m drifting sideways and then fighting a spin-out, whipping the steering wheel one way and then the other, silently pleading with all 420 horses under the hood to go dormant while I learn to manage an oversteer.
When the magic finally happens, the nose of my 911 points straight again, my back end, heavy with its rear engine, co-operating for the moment. I exhale. “Do it again. With more gas this time,” the instructor beside me demands. “All of these cars have a pocket. Once you find it, you can just stay in it and play all day.”
It is an apt metaphor suited to the 53-acre Porsche Experience Center, an automotive playground unveiled by the German car maker this week on the site of a former garbage dump-turned golf course just south of Los Angeles. About $60-million (U.S.) later, the landfill has been replaced and topped with more than six kilometres of perfect asphalt. Some of it is designed to mimic famous features of the world’s most renowned race tracks, including the Carousel, the famous banked curve on the North Loop of the Nürburgring, while other sections of the circuit are coated with slippery epoxy and studded with computer-controlled sprinklers and hydraulic kick plates designed to surprise and challenge even the most confident of drivers.
Porsche projects the facility, modelled after a similar one opened last year in Atlanta, will draw 50,000 drivers each year willing to pay three and four-figure sums for 90 minutes of instruction in a car of their choice from the company fleet. It’s also a sign that the auto maker has shifted into high gear to gain new ground in the ultra-competitive North American market amidst a period of significant flux.