Is A Porsche 911 Carrera 4S 'Super' Enough For Aussie Supercars?

With a name like Supercars, you'd figure that Australia's popular touring car championship would have, you know, an actual supercar to set the pace. What it has is a Porsche 911 Carrera 4S.

The rear-engined German sports car was unveiled this past weeked, mid-season at the Townsville 400, as the new safety car for the Virgin Australia Supercar Championship. The question is, is it "super" enough?

Consider the stats for a moment: the top version of the 911 Carrera family, the 4S packs a 3.0-liter twin-turbo flat-six rated at 420 horsepower, driven to all four wheels for a 0-60 time of four seconds flat. And that last figure may be quite conservative, in order to help justify higher-end models like the GTS, GT3, and Turbo.

But even if it isn't, the current 911 Carrera 4S is just as powerful and nearly as quick as the 996-generation Turbo from the earlier half of the last decade. And that was just about as super as supercars came in its day.

So is today's Carrera 4S a supercar? Maybe not by today's standards, with the four-second acceleration barrier no longer held up as the final frontier. But it would have been not long ago. And at any rate, it's certainly more fitting than the Cayenne that filled the role until now.