Click for Larger Image

It’s not the kind of road you would use for a top speed test, if you had a choice. No more than twenty-two feet across, soft shoulder, heavy crown, corrugated in the visual distance with a rise and fall that follows the rural Ohio land. I know that there is an S-curve a couple of miles down, but I don’t know the speed at which it may be safely taken. The only blessing: there’s no traffic. For now.

In the middle of the road we sit, this Polar Silver 2009 Porsche GT2 and I, waiting. I’m collecting my thoughts. In the right seat, Tym Switzer, the man who has tuned this GT2 to seven hundred and seven horsepower measured at the rear wheels, fidgets. We could die on this empty road, in the next twenty seconds. Tym cracks a joke to that effect. I roll the car forward lightly on the carbon-fiber clutch, and press the accelerator pedal into the carpet.

Continue reading Switzer P800 GT2: Enter the dragon.

Click for Larger Image

Photography by Andrew Didorosi

They say that sincerity is the new irony. So let’s be sincere. Prior to two weeks ago, I had never driven a car with the raw horsepower of the Switzer Performance P800 Nissan GT-R. We’re talking about seven hundred and seven ponies at all four wheels, on 93-octane gasoline, dyno-proven and road-tested. It’s terribly fashionable in this business to pretend that we’ve seen it all before, but you deserve to know the truth. Prior to driving this car, the most powerful car I’d driven was the six-hundred-horsepower 2008 Dodge Viper. On a weekly basis, I rarely drive anything faster than my poky little Audi S5 or Porsche 993. My Neon race car puts about one hundred and forty horsepower to the front wheels, although that’s enough to put you in the wall at a pretty high speed. Ask me how I know.

So while it would be very hip and print-journo of me to act like I get up every morning and drive random mega-horsepower cars, the truth of the matter is that it ain’t so. For that reason, I was very, very excited to drive the Switzer P800, particularly as it would be on a road course which I know reasonably well. This wasn’t the typical “press junket” kind of trip. I drove four hundred and fifty miles at my own expense, skipped work, and endured some really lousy weather to make it happen.

I wasn’t the only person busting tail to make sure our readers had a chance to experience the car. A notorious pro racer/road-rally bon vivant rented the track for the entire day and consented to let us share his playdate on the condition that we would maintain strict confidence about his secret new project. Tym Switzer, owner of the tuning shop which bears his name, arranged for the GT-R’s arrival and agreed that we, the Press As A Whole, would print the truth about the car’s performance, no matter what. Jo Borras, Switzer’s newly arrived PR mensch, coordinated the entire effort from the leather captain’s chair of his refrigerator-white VW Routan “press office”. The crew from Jalopnik agreed to share photographs with me in exchange for my services as camera-car operator and winter-weather stunt driver. Last but not least, the GT-R’s owner, J.R., agreed in the most nonchalant way possible to let me drive his pride and joy at one hundred and thirty miles per hour. In the snow.

Continue reading Avoidable Contact #26: Eight hundred horsepower and one little question.