The new Porsche 718 Spyder RS has a unique roof design designed to be light as possible for performance purposes and compact as possible since something bigger wouldn't fit on top of the taller Spyder RS engine. The solution, demonstrated by senior editor James Riswick, is complicated to say the least. It is a manual, multi-step process that'll have you running around the car, undoing latches, forgetting to undo latches, and quite possibly getting wet. That's the down side. The up side is that this roof design lets you enjoy some extra air and a whole lot of extra noise without getting roasted by the sun or totally blasted by wind. If you don't have to raise and lower the roof a lot, we actually think this can add up to a win
Transcript- I'm with the new Porsche 718 Spyder RS. As you can see here, it's a good looking car. Now, unlike the 718 regular one and the Spyder, this has a different roof. For two reasons, one, weight. Weighs a lot less than those.
The second, those roofs actually will not fit on top of this taller engine. And it's taller because of these extra air intakes up here. Now, let's say it goes from a lovely day as it currently is to suddenly raining, how do you put up the roof? Well, it is a multi-part and lengthy process. So let me show you how you do it.
First step, open up the roof. Oh, actually, I lied. The first step is lifting these up. And good luck remembering to do it because I've now raised this and lowered this about three times today. And each time, I have totally forgotten. I will be running around the car a lot. Now you can do it.
Let's lift this up. Now again, as I said, there's two parts to it. In here is the final part that fully encloses it. I'm not going to do that because, well, we'd be here forever. So first part, taking off the roof. As you can say-- as you can see, you don't just press a button. And this goes up. No, you physically need to do, this ideally with more than one person. It's just me.
But as you can see here, this is a light piece. Carbon fiber. And it's the only rigid element of this roof. Everything else is purely with tensile strength. So we're going to go in here. This is the only latch. You have to open that up. Now, we're going to put this on top of the car.
There you go. That was easy enough. I will say it is easier to put it on by yourself than take it off. This step here is pretty difficult. Now, there are pins on either side. And they must go into the roll hoops. OK, they're in here. And now, the little hooks, they need to go in here. And now, I must run around the car.
OK, this releases the tension. And on this-- and now, I have to put this down. Now, that's step one of tightening it. Now, we will close this put this over here. It slides here, nice and tight. Run around, put it in there. So again, this is still open here. I would need that third-- I need that second piece to totally enclose it.
But this is actually an advantage to this, to have the roof up. So you don't have sun beating down on you. It does limit wind a bit. But you do have air coming through, which is nice. And importantly, you can still hear this screaming at you up to 9,000 RPM. So while I will admit kind of a pain to put up, especially if it just suddenly starts raining on you, it's actually better in a way because you can enjoy all this sound and a bit of wind, but not get roasted by the sun. So ultimately, I say this is a win.
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The new Porsche 718 Spyder RS has a unique roof design designed to be light as possible for performance purposes and compact as possible since something bigger wouldn't fit on top of the taller Spyder RS engine. The solution, demonstrated by senior editor James Riswick, is complicated to say the …
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