Porsche Boxter specifications
Would suit:
Well, if the UK's transport minister Alastair Darling owned one, the world would almost certainly be a better place.
Price:
From £32 320.
Maximum speed:
254km/h, 0-100km/h in 6.2sec.
Combined fuel consumption:
9.65 litres/100km.
I realise you wouldn't ordinarily turn to motoring for financial advice but the rest of the market, I urge you to invest your surplus cash in motor-racing circuits. I can feel it in my water.
Driving on a public road is only destined to become less and less pleasurable over the next few years. Speed cameras, declining driving standards, congestion and the swingeing cost of motoring are, for most of us, due to render the private car no more than a very expensive means of getting from A to B without having to sit next to someone with ferocious halitosis on a bus or train.
At the same time, cars are being designed to handle better and go faster which will mean that owning a car such as the new Porsche Boxster will be like having an itch when scratching is illegal.
True, you will always be able to find a brief stretch of back road on which to let rip, but the drudgery of day-to-day motoring is going to make spending the equivalent of about R375 000 on a car as scintillating and addictive as the Boxster deeply frustrating.
Which is where track days come in... the new Boxster is in its element being pushed to the limit on a tight circuit. It's one of those cars in which every component - the suspension, the seat bolsters, the thickness of the steering wheel - has been designed, at a molecular level, to urge you to push harder every time you drive it.
Go beyond comfort speeds on corners and the Boxster will reward you with an assuredness and composure that hardly seems credible in a car that rides so smoothly at low speeds.
Own a car like this and you will want to see what it can do and the only place to do that will be on a track.
Though this new Boxster looks precisely the same as the original, launched almost 10 years ago, there have been numerous improvements that make it an even more irresistible drive.
There's more aluminium and magnesium to save weight, larger wheels, a sharper gearbox and a reworked suspension. It can be specified with Porsche's active suspension management that, unusually for such a system, you can actually feel coming into play through a fast corner to resist roll and keep you on course.
Too much fun
It's not perfect though, the Boxster. A Mazda MX5's gearbox is miles more positive; finding the right gear in a Boxster can be a lucky dip in which you can catch first when you wanted third.
Still, it hardly feels slow, and you'll be having too much fun to notice anywy; performance figures aren't likely to scare many rivals, either.
Porsche's meanness when it comes to optional extras is legendary so the standard Boxster comes with seats and a wheel and not much else. Things such as leather trim and a stereo through which you can actually hear the words can easily add the cost of a new Ford Fiesta to your bill.
The roof is canvas, too, whereas its arch rival the Mercedes SLK has the security of a folding metal top. And they missed a chance to give the car the visual makeover it deserves - you can't tell it apart from the previous model, aside from the addition of a few bits from the 911 parts catalogue.
But its flat-six's electrifying race-car yowl still sounds sensational; it will hold its value better than almost any other car over the first couple of years' ownership.
As well as which it comes with one tantalising, R6 000 extra: a stopwatch fitted to the top of the fascia to record your lap times.