Misunderstood Glory
Much has been said about the 928, and rightly so. It’s a magnificent beast of a car, and I’ll argue pretty comprehensively misunderstood. Not just by you or me, but by Porsche themselves. This is, after all, arguably the first road car Porsche ever built from a truly clean sheet of paper, and as a result, to an extent, it might be the first ever look at what Porsche really is, or maybe more accurately what Porsche was. It didn’t borrow from anything or anyone - not Volkswagen nor Audi nor even Porsche’s own history. It started from nothing except pencil and paper. This was, from the off, the first true Porsche road car. The first pure, 100% Porsche, from conception to introduction. That alone makes it special.
I’ll spare you the history lesson. Others have done it already, and in greater detail than I care to, but suffice to say the development took place in fits and starts, during an uncertain financial time for Porsche, and in an era when the future of the company was anything but clear. You probably already know the story. But when it hit the stand at the 1977 Geneva Motor Show the 928 was… arresting.
You already know that, too. It’s still a looker, even nearly a half-century later.
But what is it?
Porsche initially pegged it as a range-topping, luxury grand tourer, but that was in the early 1970’s, long before the car debuted. When the first models rolled off the assembly line in 1978, were they actual “grand tourers?” Should they have been expected to go toe-to-toe in dealership showrooms with cars like a Jaguar XJ-S, BMW 633, and the rather weak-kneed coupes Mercedes-Benz was hawking at the time? That seems like a false equivalency, because the 928 would rip the throat out of any of those cars in pretty much any performance metric you could conjure, and it was significantly more expensive and more powerful than the Porsche 911SC which was just being introduced around the same time.
The “bumperless” sculpted nose and tail are entirely normal now, but they weren’t normal back then, and the styling was exotic as all hell. The laid-back pop-up headlamps had only been seen before on Gandini’s magnificent Lamborghini Miura, and the punchy V8 engine and dog-leg 5-speed manual gearbox (it’s largely a myth that the available automatic was the overwhelming choice of buyers in the early years) with the latter sitting in the rear for near perfect weight distribution, clearly put a bigger premium on performance than opulence. It was beautifully trimmed inside, with air conditioning and leather, but the car is lower, louder, and vastly more sinister than it tends to get credit for. It was roughly the same size and weight, with roughly the same power output, as the water cooled 996 which came along 25 years later, and no one accuses that car of being a porky GT car, so the 928 was not exceptionally large or heavy, and it never has been.
Do you see what I’m getting at, here?
I have owned the car pictured here for five years now, and I have driven it everywhere, both road and track, and it is astonishingly capable on both, even by today’s standards. It is a 1982 928S, what is known as an “m28/11” car because it has the 4.7L 300bhp 2-valve engine and a 5-speed manual gearbox. By 1982, Mercedes-Benz had introduced the w126-chassis 500SEC, which made some impressive horsepower for the time, but it was larger, softer, heavier, automatic-transmission only, and produced about 230bhp to the 928’s 300 - a full 20% less. The BMW 633’s admittedly lovely inline six made something like 160bhp, depending on spec. The Jaguar XJ-S V12 made good power, but the car didn’t offer much in the way of true sporting potential. These cars, the SEC and 633 and Xj-S, these were grand touring cars at the time. Bigger, softer, slower, and cheaper. The 928 was a totally different type of car. And Porsche promoting the car as a “grand tourer” probably did it a huge disservice. If someone wanted a comfy GT car, and they drove all four? The 928 would probably seem too low, too cramped, too serious, too… angry by comparison.
So what was it? I would argue it was more of a liveable supercar for its time. The styling, still striking now, was otherworldly at the time. The acceleration and top speed were much closer to something like an Aston Martin V8 Vantage or even a Ferrari 512bbi than they were to a BMW 633, as was the asking price. But it was far more reliable and useable than either. On a twisty road, with a reason to run hard, I would expect my 928S to show its heels to a V8 Vantage, or even a Ferrari 512, because both of those cars are intimidating and difficult to drive to their limits on a public road. But the 928 isn’t. The steering is beautifully direct and perfectly weighted. The balance is spot on, and although the grip levels are high, when it breaks away it does so smoothly and progressively, allowing you to power out of even fairly rapid corners in a controlled, full-throttle drift that makes me feel like Lewis Hamilton. Try any of that with a 500SEC! The brakes are powerful and progressive, and the engine makes thrust everywhere, at every RPM, but it fairly SCREAMS when it’s up in the rev range.
It doesn’t feel like a Jaguar XJ-S. It feels like an Aston Martin V8 Vantage. But a much, much, MUCH better one.
Look, I’m not trying to make the 928 - my car - more than it is. It’s a Porsche 928S, and I love it. And Porsche loved it also, because they built it for seventeen years even though they rarely sold more than about 5000 of them in any given one of those seventeen. And that’s worldwide. They continually refined and revised it, and it got softer and more comfortable as time went one, and more of them were sold with automatic transmissions later in the model run, and I admit that it did sorta morph into a cushy GT as the years went by. But I would argue that was Porsche’s biggest mistake. I think they should have gone the other way. Made a “Carrera” version, perhaps, and gone toe-to-toe with Ferrari, Lamborghini and Aston Martin. It was already right there. It had everything, and it had something none of the supercars of the time had - Porsche’s sport car nous, engineering might, and world-class build quality.
So that’s my argument. The Porsche 928. If you’ve never driven one, you should. And better still if it’s an early car. I think you might have your eyes opened. I know I sure have.