Motoring Editor, Michael McAleer, braved the fogs of the British Midlands at Donington racetrack recently and got to serious grips with the Porsche 911
Having made the red-eye Ryanair flight to the East Midlands airport near Nottingham, the fact that we couldn't see the end of the stairway at the bottom of our plane was not a good start to the day.
Weather - even torrential rain - isn't enough to put a dent on a day at Donington racetrack with a line of Porsche 911s and a few Caymans at our beck and call. Yet the Achilles' heel of every racetrack is the wretched cloak of fog.
We were here for a day's track testing, with the real attraction being the chance to get behind the wheel of the latest Porsche 911 Turbo - all 480 bhp of it - on the same circuit where in 1993 Ayrton Senna won one of his most famous victories against Prost.
Yet here we were, passing hour after hour staring blindly into a grey vapour, unable to see the end of the pitlane never mind the first corner and clogging our arteries with bacon butties and coffee.
Finally, as it seemed that all was lost and our recommended calorie count for the year was about to be consumed in one morning, the wind gently brushed across the British Midlands, swooping up the cloud cover.
Red lights turned to green and helmets were donned. It's normal to work your way up through the performance ranks, but we'd had enough of twiddling our thumbs. So it was straight into the 911 Turbo.
This car needs no introduction: it's the poster-boy for an entire generation of petrolheads, from its hair-raising arrival back in 1974 to this latest 997 version. Along the way the car has gone from raw untethered beast to more civilised town traveller, albeit with the ability to outrun anything that would dare to challenge it.
In this latest version, Porsche reckon it's combined the essence of all previous generations and wrapped them up into one awesome car.
The basic stats show a 0-100km/h time of 3.7 seconds. But that's just the start: how about getting from 65km/h to 100km/h in 1.4 seconds? Put that in the context of overtaking traffic on a long straight and you begin to understand the sheer awesome power on tap from the 3.6-litre turbocharged engine.
The most significant change to the new car is the development of a new set of turbos - one for each set of three-cylinders - that pushed power output up from 415bhp to 480bhp and increased the torque on tap to 620Nm. In layman's terms that means as your right foot pushes to the floor so the back of your skull gets buried in the headrest.
On the Donington track the stellar performance came into its own. Despite all that power coming from the rear-mounted engine any rear end motion is confined to a gradual - and manageable slide, thanks in part to a series of inputs from the traction control system that controls torque delivery to the wheels, an active suspension system that adjusts the dampers, and a stability programme that mixes brake, throttle and the rear differential to control understeer and oversteer. The end result is a perfectly controllable motoring monster.
Turn the systems off and you can, of course, swing the tail out, but it's not the white knuckle snap that put fear into previous owners.
Instead this is a more quick, yet gradual slide. It's still not something you would test anywhere other than an open track but it does reveal a better sense of balance in the car than in earlier editions.
All this power - and a serious dollop of prestige - comes at a price, of course: €215,700 for the manual version and €220,000 for the Tiptronic. That's a lot of cash for a car that in appearance at least hasn't changed dramatically in the last decade.
Yet for the fortunate few, it offers a combination of engineering excellence, breathtaking performance and an ability to behave itself in everyday driving that will put it ahead of anything the more temperamental Italians have to offer.