Happiness is seeing Germany in a Porsche

PETER BLEAKNEY FOR THE TORONTO STAR

When you get to drive a Porsche GT3 where it was meant to be driven, then the experience really takes flight.

Peter Bleakney

SPECIAL TO THE STAR

BEST Moment

Springtime in the Swabian Alb is lovely. Grasses are lush, trees are in bloom, and the fragrant air of this gentle mountain range hangs over the green valleys like a warm blanket. Dotting the bucolic landscape are ancient hamlets that apparently slammed the door on progress, oh, a few centuries ago.

I was lucky enough to connect these dots via some of the finest driving roads extant in a 2010 Porsche 911 GT3 – probably the best 911 ever.

It was late in the afternoon and the driving program was over. Okay if I take that Guards Red GT3 over there for a blast, Herr Porsche-keeper? Ja. So I took off, solo, in search of some castles I'd seen earlier in the day.

The GT3, with its race-derived 435 hp naturally aspirated 3.8 L flat-six hooked to a six-speed manual puts the driver right at the pointy end of the 911 experience. This car is so immediate, so engaging, so thrilling and yet hardly intimidating, largely due to further chassis development and now-standard stability control.

And what a sound. Turned up to 11, we broadcast the Swabian Symphony No. 911 in B-flat-six. While the GT3 would likely become a crashy, noisy and tiresome detriment to one's driver's licence here in the GTA, in its natural environment of mirror-smooth German tarmac, Porsche's most electrifying 911 gave me an unforgettable ride.

Worst Moment

Four a.m. comes real early in Modena, Italy, after an evening of sampling the fine local cuisine and vino. And so I found myself bleary-eyed in the hotel lobby with a bunch of auto writers, awaiting our ride to the Bologna airport. A Lancia MPV pulled up out of the darkness and everyone piled in – except me. Don't worry, the driver said. There was another on the way.

Sure enough, another Lancia showed up momentarily, so I jumped in the passenger seat next to a female driver with a wild mane of dark tresses that flew about as she argued vehemently with someone on the other end of her cellphone.

"Can we go now?" I asked.

"No," she snapped, and continued her rant. Then she jumped out, ran into the hotel, came back and told me we couldn't leave because we were missing a journalist.

So we waited. And waited. Apparently this journo was so hung over he couldn't get out of bed. Finally, after telling me how much she hated Modena because it was too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer, and how much she hated driving for Fiat SpA, she told me we had to leave if I wanted to catch my plane. "There's not enough time to take the highway now, but this early we can take a shortcut."

She tore out of the parking lot, then got on the phone and started yelling again. Somehow she steered, shifted gears, held her phone and gesticulated wildly all at the same time. Soon we were cutting through the pre-dawn Italian countryside at an alarming rate. I clutched the grab handle as Maria Andretti expertly clipped the apexes and worked the manual transmission of this Italian diesel minivan with the racy Alcantara interior. I discovered she was divorced, her boyfriend was a lazy so-and-so, and she lived alone with six cats. That's never a good sign.

Mercifully, most of these rural roads were arrow straight. As we blasted through a sleeping hamlet, a 50 km/h sign flashed by the window. We were doing 135.

Maria did get me to the airport alive – and on time. "I'm going back to bed," she said with a grin, apparently quite satisfied with her performance.

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