MT. HOOD NATIONAL FOREST, Ore. – “Get action!” That was Teddy Roosevelt’s cure for what by modern standards would’ve likely been diagnosed as depression and attention deficit disorder. Basically, it meant do things and go places, which for him was bounding across the Badlands of Dakota territory, going off to war in Cuba and casting off onto a near-fatal quest through the Amazon rainforest – just to name a few adventures in what was indeed a life of near non-stop action.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Teddy Roosevelt recently. Not because I’d dare compare actual medically diagnosed disorders to being a bit down due to the state of the world, but because I think his notion to “get action” will forever ring true. Doing things and going places is indeed restorative, and the automobile presents a means by which to do both. And “going places” does not mean Target.
Driving the 2020 Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 most definitely qualifies as doing something. This is not a car in which you just lean back and switch on the adaptive cruise control – literally, you can’t get ACC, and the optional full bucket seats don’t recline.
You drive the 718, with the steering and throttle responding to the delicate fidgets of your fingers and toes; the mid-engine layout rotating about you at its center; and the transmission shifting gears only when you tell it to.
And with its bespoke lowered suspension and naturally aspirated 4.0-liter flat-six, the GT4 goes further than any other Cayman by making you not only a part of the action, but allowing you to feel and hear every part of it, too.
For the going places part of the T.R. equation, I’d be driving from Portland, Ore. to Detroit … also Oregon. Now, besides making for a fun headline, I had heard that the 100-mile scenic route to this tiny town on a lake of the same name consists of exceptional driving roads. Fitting name, then, although perhaps an ironic one given the dearth of such roads in actual Detroit.
Fitting for Oregon is the off-and-on drizzle throughout the day, which at least makes my on-road drive of the GT4 comparable to my on-track drive last July that more fully revealed the car’s attributes and capabilities.
A hardcore sports car wearing performance rubber and blessed with 414 horsepower might give you pause in such damp conditions, but the GT4’s utmost control and the linear doling out of its 309 pound-feet of naturally aspirated torque breed confidence.
This is definitively not a showy, high-powered hooning machine – the dual-mode sport exhaust barely gets louder in its loud mode, and refrains from crackling and popping on overrun.
