I became financially independent right after entering college.

Chapter 20 Porsche
The next morning at around nine o'clock, Bai Chou got up "early", washed up, went to ING Plaza to have some breakfast, and took a taxi to the Porsche 4S store.

Jiangning District, where Jiangning University Town is located, is considered a suburb, but suburbs also have their advantages, such as better greening, more 4S stores, and a relatively large second-hand car trading market.

Most mainstream car brands have 4S stores or sales centers in Jiangning District, which is not far from Nanchuan.

After careful consideration, Bai Chou decided to choose Porsche as his first car, and kept BMW as a backup.

Bai Chou, who loves driving, admires the car-making concepts of Porsche and BMW very much: compared with most luxury brands and sports car brands, Porsche and BMW’s pursuit of performance and sports is purer and more extreme.

This can be seen from the tuning strategies of Porsche and BMW for their flagship sports models.

If you have ever been to a racetrack, you will know that corners are the place where a car's comprehensive performance, parameters and tuning are best reflected.

If your skills are not good enough, when you push the car to the limit when entering a corner, two unexpected situations will often occur: pushing the head and drifting.

Understeer means understeer. For example, the front of the car should turn 90° according to the degree of steering wheel you turn, but it only turns 80°. It is generally common in front-wheel drive cars.

Swaying is oversteering, the rear wheels slip and lose grip, and the body posture becomes difficult to control. It is generally common in rear-wheel drive cars.

Theoretically, the most perfect way to take a corner is to neither push the head nor drift the tail, and to use the car's power, downforce, and tire grip to the extreme, so as to take the shortest possible time to take the corner.

Ideally, perfect tuning would allow the car to be in as close to perfect a position as possible when using the trail braking technique into a corner.

But in fact, most mainstream sports car, supercar and performance car brands will not tune their cars to perfection.

For example, Ferrari and Lamborghini have always used the method of raising the front wheel chassis height and adjusting the front wheel camber to deliberately push the car forward.

Almost all mainstream models sold by Ferrari and Lamborghini in the past decade or so have been tuned by default at the factory to be more forward-looking.

why?
Because when you drive a high-horsepower car to the limit and your cornering posture is not perfect, drifting is more dangerous and more difficult to save the car than pushing the front.

Sliding when entering a corner at high speed is different from drifting in a fixed circle in a large open area. It is itself an unexpected situation and is several times more dangerous.

The rear wheels slip and lose grip, and the car becomes very difficult to control. If you are not careful, it will be completely out of control, with the worst case being a rollover or skidding or spinning.

Car damage is a small matter, the safety of the car owner is a big matter.

Even professional, top-level professional drivers cannot always recover from drifting while cornering, not to mention those wealthy car owners who can only be considered amateurs.

Compared to drifting, it is quite easy to recover by pushing the head.

99% of the front wheel push is caused by entering the corner too fast. At this time, as long as you lightly lift the accelerator pedal to slow down the speed, the front wheel will regain grip.

Pushing the nose and drifting are relative. When the default tuning of a car is to push the nose, even if the car is a high-horsepower rear-wheel drive car, it is difficult to drift when entering and during a corner, and it drives more like a high-horsepower front-wheel drive car.

That is why Ferrari prohibits car owners from privately driving their cars to do lap times, and why it sends a team of technicians to perform special adjustments on the test cars when the automotive media is doing lap times.

In fact, Lamborghini has been doing the same thing, and the cars they provide to the media for lap time testing are all specially tuned.

Because the vast majority of the cars they sell are "street cars" rather than "racing cars", their tuning methods are more comfortable and conservative rather than pursuing perfection on the track.

They'll give you a car that's very fast on a track, but they won't give you a car that might kill you on a track. And what about Porsche and BMW?

They really will give you a car that, when pushed to its limits, might just kill you headfirst on the track.

Porsche's 911 and BMW's M division have always had the philosophy of bringing a racing car that races on the track to the road as authentically as possible.

More racing-oriented tuning, lighter weight, and even less regard for the driver's road driving comfort or even their life...

(The actual weight of the Porsche 911 is much lighter than most of the Nissan models)

They have indeed reduced the difficulty for car owners to control the car through various electronic controls and driving assistance, making the car more stable and easier to drive.

However, their tuning is indeed very aggressive, and they will not deliberately push the car forward for the safety of the driver. Correspondingly, pushing it to the limit is more dangerous, and it is easy to drift when entering a corner.

We have given you a near-perfect express car. If you have the ability, you can push it to the limit. If you don't have the ability and still want to push it to the limit, then you should crash it.

Bai Chou admires such Porsches and such BMWs.

Two years ago, when he came to Jinling to visit his cousin, he went to the race track with his cousin: his cousin was driving his modified BMW M2, which had been modified in who knows how many times, and Bai Chou could only sit in the passenger seat with a helmet on and look at it with envy.

This is the "driving" that Bai Chou likes.

Bai Chou, who has only a short car history and is a new driver, naturally chose BMW and Porsche as his entry-level brands for training his driving skills on the track in the future.

Soon, the taxi stopped outside the gate of Jiangning Porsche 4S store.

Bai Chou looked up at the 4S store. The overall architectural style was simple, with a conspicuous red Porsche logo on the white wall, which, combined with the glass wall, gave it a strong sense of modernity.

There are dozens or even hundreds of cars parked in the parking lot outside the store, most of which are Porsches. Those with license plates are probably cars sent in for repair and maintenance by their owners, and the few without license plates are probably current cars, inventory cars, or cars that have not yet been delivered.

Ordinary.

It is no different from the Handan Mercedes-Benz and Land Rover 4S stores that Bai Chou visited with his family. Most brands of 4S stores have this decoration style.

When you walk to the glass door, you don’t need to push it. The glass door will automatically open to both sides when it senses that a customer is coming.

When you step into the 4S store, the first thing that catches your eye is the dozen or so Porsche mainstream models of various colors parked in the hall.

Macan, Panamera, Cayenne, Porsche 718, 911...

Several shopping guides in blazers and tight skirts sat behind the service desk, chatting and talking to each other. This is also the normal state of car sales at the Porsche 4S store when there is no live broadcast task.

The higher selling price naturally leads to lower customer traffic at Porsche 4S stores than other luxury brands. Many times, Porsche's car sales are in a state of inactivity.

Not to mention, it is still ten o'clock in the morning. Generally, the people who come to the 4S shop at this time are car owners who send their cars for maintenance. The number of customers looking at cars will not increase until the afternoon.

(End of this chapter)