Miami Heat: 2015 Porsche 918 Spyder vs. 1989 Porsche 959 

Two generations of Porsche hypercars prove to be fine drugs of choice for this or any other era. 

When we arrived at the former den of debauchery, we found a young woman standing out front wearing only a bright-red, high-cut one-piece bathing suit out of which swelled a positively unnatural volume of cocoa-hued breast and butt flesh. She wasn’t there for the entertainment of a couple of stout, Northern white boys and a fast-talking Brit, all wilting from the heat and atmospheric moisture. In fact, as far as we could tell, the only reason she was at the Mutiny Hotel—once home to one of the Miami area’s most notorious members-only nightclubs, a hangout for drug lords and druggies and dancing queens of the late 1970s and early ’80s—was to pose in front of a small stand of tropical foliage near the hotel’s driveway. Judging by the hat and T-shirt of the man taking her picture, this was a shoot for Hooters, that famed purveyor of chicken wings and poor taste.

Otherwise, the outside of the once-infamous Mutiny, which served as the inspiration for the Babylon Club in the Brian De Palma version of Scarface, looked like any other boutique hotel, attended by one or two languid valets. The Mutiny’s logo, a stencil of a pirate’s head, is the only thing that remains the same from the roaring early ’80s. The hotel no longer has rooms with ornate themed décor (the Egyptian room!). There are no more in-room Jacuzzis. There are no more mirrors above the beds. There’s no club at all anymore, just a Thai restaurant in the lobby. The only flashy cars out front tonight will be the two supercars we’ve brought. 

Times have clearly changed since the freewheeling whiteout of Reagan-era Miami, and so have the playthings of the fabulously wealthy. In fact, though we’ve brought a supercar from the 1980s, a low-mileage silver 1987 Porsche 959, it would never have been the ride of a cocaine-dealing villain on Miami Vice. This car—nay, this Godhead of hypercars—was never officially sold in the United States. But it was a seismic event in the world of high-performance automobiles, certainly for a teenager in Detroit.

To me, the 959 might as well have been reverse-engineered from spacecraft. It was the vehicular equivalent of the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane. Packed in its skin of aluminum and plastic reinforced with Kevlar (the stuff used in bulletproof vests!) was a sequentially turbocharged flat-six engine with liquid-cooled heads and air-cooled cylinders making a then-stunning 444 horsepower, more than double what a regular 911 of that era made. And unlike the Ferrari of the time, that bloodstained wedge called the F40, the Porsche carried four-wheel drive. Not just any old four-wheel drive, but programmable, adjustable four-wheel drive able to move power fore and aft. It was basically beyond comprehension that a driver could tell the car the atmospheric conditions in which he was driving and the car would then tailor the four-wheel-drive system to suit those conditions. This surely took more than a Commodore 64’s worth of computing power to accomplish. The 959 had adjustable ride height and three-way adjustable dampers, either of which could be selected by way of rotary switches on the center console. It had six forward gears. Porsche referred to the low first gear as “G” for Gelände, or terrain. Its magnesium wheel spokes were hollow, forming an air cavity with the tires, each carrying tire-pressure monitors that could tell if a tire had gone down or even if a wheel was cracked. And the car could run at a moderate speed on a flat thanks to the Denloc system, which kept the tire on the wheel even with minimal air pressure. The car could drive on a flat tire, people! 

That the 959 looked like a 911 caught midway through transmogrifying into a race car made it all the more appealing. This was better living through technology. The 959 promised that an almost-normal-looking car could be faster than a Lamborghini Countach. In all ways save for its styling, the car was prophetic. It was a blueprint not just for Porsche, which would soon use engines with two turbochargers, electronically controlled adaptive dampers, four-wheel drive, and hollow-spoke wheels on its less rarefied models in the coming decade, but also for the industry as a whole.

Like Miami, Porsche was flush with cash back then, with a pile of profits contributed to by many suddenly rich Miami-area residents. So the company was in the mood to spend lavishly. According to Karl Ludvigsen’s landmark book, Excellence was Expected, Porsche’s net profit for the 1983–84 financial year was $28.9 million. The next year, it was up to $51.8 million. In the end, according to Porsche advisory board member Ferdinand Piëch, each of the 337 959s, including prototypes and preproduction units, cost the company $720,000 to build. This for a car that, according to our 1987 road test, carried a $227,000 price tag (in West Germany). 

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