The recently unveiled Porsche 911 R and Chevrolet Corvette Grand Sport reopen an age-old enthusiast debate.
It's one of those
simple questions that can lead to a whole night's worth of discussion at
a bar, in the pits of an endurance race, or on an Internet forum: Should the "enthusiast version" of a car be cheaper than the standard version, or should it cost more?
In one corner, you've got the people who think that more is always
better. Call them the ZR1 crowd, after the old first-generation King of
the Hill Vette that basically represented a high-buck rework of the C4
Corvette. Yeah, they want more. More power. More tire. More exotic
materials. Limited production numbers. Sticker prices that guarantee
exclusivity.
Then
you have the people who think that, when it comes to enthusiast cars,
less is more. I'm one of them, most of the time. Less weight, less
equipment, but especially less money. Our patron saint is Max Hoffman,
who came up with the idea of the Porsche 356 Speedster, thus doing more
with less. We preferred the '89 Civic Si to the Prelude 4WS, the Sentra
SE-R to the NX2000, the '93 911 RS America to the Turbo 3.6. A
surprising number of us, when pressed, will admit that some of the best
times of our driving lives happened behind the wheel of Fox-body
Mustangs or four-cylinder Japanese minitrucks.
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