Guy pulls up to the canyon meet in a 996 Turbo and three people make the fried-egg joke before he's out of the car. Twenty minutes later he's gone, and the C7 that tried to follow him out of the second corner is still explaining that he wasn't really pushing. That's the whole 996 Turbo situation. The headlights cost it a decade of respect and nobody bothered to look at what's underneath them, which is the funniest part, because the engine in this car has nothing to do with the one everybody's scared of. The base 996's M96 is where the IMS horror stories live. The Turbo got the Mezger — dry sump, race-derived architecture traced back to the GT1 program, no IMS bearing to lose sleep over. Same engine family Porsche kept using in the 997.1 Turbo and the GT3s that people happily pay triple for. The recipe: 3.6 twin-turbo Mezger, 415hp and 415 lb-ft, VarioCam Plus, all-wheel drive, 6-speed manual, low-4-second car in stock trim on 20-year-old tire tech. Tick the X50 box and you get bigger...