All Terrain Sportscar

A Porsche for five? For me to drive? In the desert sands of the UAE? Am I seeing a mirage or has the shamal got to me? None of it and yet all of it because that is what so clearly defines driving the best all terrain high performance machine in the world in the best of environment tailor made for it. And why all this excitement? Nothing could be a better reason to go dune raiding in Dubai in a Porsche Cayenne than for the fact that it is India bound.

I was wondering whether the idea to head to Dubai on my own was such a good one. Coming just an hour into my drive with the Porsche Cayenne which was getting bogged down in the soft sandy wastes of the Dubai desertscape. The office knew that Porsche was finally coming to India and from that I surely knew that even though the staple product of the Stuttgart-based sports car maker has been the evocative 911, its best-seller in India would surely be the Cayenne SUV. Of course this is still conjecture because no Porsche has officially gone on sales in India as yet but judging from the sales performance of the M-class Mercedes, expect many to opt for the proper five-seater Cayenne over the 911 or the Boxster. I would do this if I had the money and especially after my drive over the dunes in Dubai.

But getting back to where I began, we had requested the German car maker’s Middle East and African liaison office in Dubai to arrange for yours truly to drive the Cayenne and the Boxster and surprisingly they agreed. I jetted down to the commercial hub of the UAE, spent a day getting acclimatised and the next day was rumbling out of town in a silver grey Cayenne with a minder from Porsche and my brother Neville riding shotgun. The plan was to first drive down the expressway and then turn off into the desert to explore and experience the capabilities of Porsche’s large SUV built to challenge not just the likes of the BMW X5 and the Mercedes-Benz M- class but also the very notion that Porsche could also build machines to perform effortlessly on hard shoulders and soft soil.

I thought I knew it all but the desert showed me otherwise. Minutes after turning off the road at a wadi where Neville usually takes SUVs to photo shoot for his automotive publication in the UAE, I thought I should be easy enough with the car so that I could soak up the scenery and the experience. That was a bad mistake and I knew it the second I decided to go easy. The car bogged down and we were stuck. The Porsche minder then got to work and he just about extricated the car and we were rolling again. Neville, with more than three years of desert driving experience began to tell me how to drive and what telltale signs I had to look out for to denote soft and dangerous patches as against hard packed desert surfaces where the Cayenne could fly.

I took heart hearing the surface existed for flying but before I could head out to it, within another five minutes it was that unmistakable sinking feeling as I bogged down yet again. This time we were stuck well and proper for over half an hour, and because we had no back-up car, it needed a slight deflation of the 255/55 R18 tyres and Neville to take the wheel. The half hour in the desert proved like ten times that and I was drenched with sweat and the heat was beating my temples like someone had turned a blowtorch on my face. Makes me marvel at the stamina and the endurance of the rally raiders, be they doing the Dakar or the UAE Desert Challenge.

Once we had extricated ourselves and Neville had got us on to firmer terra firma - pun surely not intended, I got behind the wheel yet again. It was a series of dunes which led away and we had to drive in the direction of the wind and the wavy worm of the dunes. I knew the Cayenne had all-wheel drive, it had V8 Porsche power and that there was the Porsche Traction Management (PTM) system at my beck and call and the only thing I didn’t need was to make another mistake.

The Cayenne helped me to drive better, no doubt about that. The trick technology on board saw to it that I wasn’t making beginner’s mistakes any longer and if I was, the mistakes didn’t mirror the same intensity which had seen us get bogged down twice earlier. Or as I started to unravel the whole experience in my mind on the flight back home, the technology only hid my mistakes and worked around them to enable me to drive in a natural, conventional manner. One of these could have been the incline sensor which cut in a most unobtrusive manner whenever I was tackling gradients, silently modifying the shift points for better uphill thrust. Or it could also have been the Porsche Traction Management (PTM) system working along with the Porsche Active Suspension Management (PASM) which ensured that it never wasted an iota of its prodigious torque, applying it where it was needed most.

Once on the packed dune surfaces the Cayenne was a dream. It would skim along at over 150kmph and it was only the ripple on the sand dunes which gave a hint that we weren’t as yet airborne! Could also have been the fact that the optional air suspension (OE on the top of the line Cayenne Turbo) was doing a wonderful job of isolating me just enough to feel as if I was on billiard smooth tarmac. I was having fun thundering on the sides of the dune slopes (not having yet mastered the way to jump them and also not being brave enough to get bogged down when the nearest help was almost an hour away!), squirting the throttle delicately just to get the naturally aspirated V8 to sing along while at the same time turning in to avoid a gully and stay on the hard stuff. It was the stuff of dreams, a dream that this could only have been happening in a sports car.

This fact only hit me when we decided we better get back on a normal black top and as things would have it, we had come to the bay side where there were narrow back roads with hardly any traffic flow either side. I thought nothing could get better than my stint on the dunes but then I was not thinking Porsche perfect.

One thing which I recollect now was that even when I got on to proper roads, I didn’t seem to have been quizzing the Porsche minder! Obviously the great feeling that the car was responding brilliantly to my every input was mind numbing and intoxicating put together and then it being to slowly but surely ram home the point, that hey buddy, you are in a Porsche.

The first hint came when I began to take corners at speeds which would have had the local constabulary haul me away for having too much merriment. The large and tall Cayenne cornered absolutely flat with hardly a trace of roll making me think that I was driving at an old codger’s pace. As I prepared to take a few more corners, it was Neville who cut in and said if I wasn’t careful I would be going around corners at 160kmph or more, having seen me go progressively quicker as the kilometres racked up on the odometer. No, he wasn’t trying to calm his shattered nerves but to tell me that sometimes other cars also did trundle down this seemingly deserted road.