CREATING a rocket-fast, world-class supercar that is also usable, dependable and workaday-sensible is like persuading an abstract expressionist to paint by the numbers. He might do it for a moment or two if you asked politely, daubing cobalt blue on ?5? and burnt umber on ?23.? But all the while, he aches to fling gobs of paint at the canvas ? not by the numbers, but by the bucket.

Which brings us to the 2007 Porsche 911 Turbo. However expensive and exotic it may be, relative to a Camry or a Cobalt, it was still meant to be a paint-by-numbers kind of car ? reliable, solid, steadfast. It must run in heat, cold and ice, year after year after year.

Then why are the Turbo, David Murray and I raging down the pit straight on the grand prix course at Watkins Glen raceway at full racing speed, wide open at 155 miles an hour? One explanation could be that David Murray is a professional racer and knows what he?s doing.

But he isn?t driving! He?s carrying on a running commentary, while behind the wheel, I monitor myself for early signs of an infarction.

?Really great, isn?t it?? Mr. Murray says in his easy Georgia drawl. ?If this car had slicks,? he adds, referring to racing tires, ?it?d lap here just as fast as my racecar!? His racecar is a Porsche 911 GT3, the fastest racing 911 there is.

At the first turn after the pits, I stand on the brakes hard ? but way too early. The Turbo?s huge 14.96-inch ceramic discs stop us as if we?ve hit a bridge abutment.

?Rocks, doesn?t it?? Mr. Murray says, beaming.

It rocks.

This entirely tractable daily driver performs like a purpose-built racecar. It accelerates with the explosive power of a rifle shot, then stops like a bullet hitting a tree. The Porsche Turbo combines Jackson Pollock with painting-by-the-numbers. It will dither around town at 30 m.p.h., daubing cobalt blue on ?5? like the Golden Years painting class down at the senior center. But say the word and it slings buckets of paint manically, like a Pollock imitator who has had too much coffee.

This new car reinvents Porsche?s legendary Turbo line. Since the first 261-horsepower Turbo in 1975, Porsche has released a new, hotter version every few years. In 1995, the Turbo had 408 horsepower, and in 2000, 450 horsepower. This latest Turbo delivers a sensational 480 horsepower at 6,000 r.p.m., combined with a similarly sensational 460 pound-foot of torque, available uninterrupted from 1,950 to 5,000 r.p.m.

And a special Turbo 10-second-at-a-time overboost function produces a positively prurient 505 pound-foot. It?s the work of the devil.

?The last Turbo was so great,? Mr. Murray says. ?Then they make this much improvement. It makes you wonder what more they can do.?

Mr. Murray is a Porsche driving instructor, so his sympathies are clear. But his remark is more than mere advertorial. Besides adding raccoon tails and mud flaps, what more can Porsche do? More outrageous performance in a volume production car is hard to fantasize.

Central to harnessing the Turbo?s explosive thrust is all-wheel drive, and that was never truer than with this new model. With all four wheels driving, the Turbo?s 3,572-pound curb weight (with the Tiptronic S five-speed automatic, or 3,495 pounds with a six-speed manual) zaps to 60 m.p.h. in 3.4 seconds. That?s frightfully close to the immortal world-champion Porsche 917K racecar, which got to 60 in 2.8 seconds.

Startlingly, the automatic is quicker than the manual, which reaches 60 in a turtle-ish 3.7 seconds.

Tiptronic S can be left in fully automatic mode or shifted with thumb buttons on the steering wheel. Either way, its lightning-quick shifts keep the twin turbochargers blowing at full gale, commanding the engine?s maximum power. Tip S is so good that on the track Mr. Murray said, ?Just leave it in automatic ? it?s faster.?

Without prompting, Tiptronic S downshifts when you?re braking or climbing, and if the tires lose grip in a corner (they did), it automatically upshifts to reduce wheelspin and restore grip. Working in conjunction with all-wheel drive and the Porsche Stability Management system, control is restored before you know anything is amiss.

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Some people seem a perfect fit for the cars they drive, like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his Hummer, Michael Jordan and his Ferrari. Yet most drivers’ faces and bearing give away clues that tip off their favored model, a new study has found.

Psychologists at Julius-Maximilians University in Wurzburg, Germany, report in a recent issue of the Journal of Individual Differences that students correctly matched photographs of male and female drivers to pictures of the cars they drove almost 70 percent of the time.

The drivers’ age and wealth were the most helpful cues, the researchers reported.

Psychologists had shown in previous studies that people can accurately gauge some personality traits, like extroversion, from photos of strangers, and from personal effects, like a CD collection or bedroom decorations. The German study is the first to demonstrate that clues from both sources can be combined to match owners to their cars, the authors say.

The finding demonstrates how nuanced our habitual, often stereotype-based, judgments can be, said Samuel Gosling, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas, who did not take part in the research.

“It is possible that when the traffic light turns green, the tan minivan will race away and the red Corvette will move away slowly, but people don’t buy cars randomly, and usually we make accurate assumptions about them,” he said.

He added, “We don’t just make inferences about the drivers but about their behavior, their music collection, whether they’re more likely to listen to jazz or rock, their movie preferences, whether they like romantic comedies or action films.”

In the study, the psychologists took photographs, from the waist up, of 60 men and women at a rest stop who agreed to participate in the study. Their cars, also photographed, included luxury models, modest family sedans and compact cars, from BMWs and Audis to Opels, Fords and Volkswagens.

The students looked at 60 sets of three photos, matching one of a driver to one of two car pictures ? either the correct one, or one belonging to another driver.

In matching experiments like this, early choices often alter later ones: if you have already found someone to match with a black-cherry Porsche Boxster, you are less likely to pair it with another person later. But because many of the cars were similar in color and model, students’ early matches were not likely to alter later ones, the authors said.

The researchers found that 41 pairs, or about 68 percent, were correctly matched by more than half of the students. “Interestingly, it seems to be easier to match people with cars than people with animate beings like dogs. Or people with their babies,” concluded the authors, Georg W. Alpers and Antje B. M. Gerdes.

A nearly 70 percent accuracy rate is very high, and partly reflects the significance of two clues in particular ? age and apparent affluence, the authors report. Matching older, wealthy-looking drivers to luxury cars and young ones to compacts almost certainly proved a good strategy.

But there is more to the matching than that, other experts said. Scratches, dings and dents in a car suggest one thing about a driver, while a factory polish reflects another. A four-wheel-drive Subaru with a ski rack suggests an active owner ? unless the racks appear unused. And people choose cars, within their budget or not, partly to project a public identity, and the public well knows it, Dr. Gosling said.

Moreover, in making judgments, people soak up dozens of clues unconsciously, noting the emotional cast of a person’s face in a photo, say, or the style of the hair, the texture of the clothing, the tilt and quality of the eyeglasses.

“We are constantly trying to make sense of the world by picking up clues from the physical and social environment, in order to predict what’s going to happen,” Dr. Gosling said.

Given the necessity, value and danger of cars ? and the cultural connotations of particular models ? it is hardly surprising that people are attuned to their social meanings.

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With its high and sustained propulsive power in the lower and medium speed ranges, the model has a top speed of 258 kilometers per hour, accelerating from 0 to 100 km/h in 6.1 seconds.

“The Cayman is convincing proof of the fact that outstanding performance statistics do not necessarily mean high fuel consumption,” said Porsche. “According to European standards, it consumes on average only 9.3 liters per 100 kilometers.”

With prices starting from around GBP36,220, the newcomer is more than GBP7,500 cheaper than the existing Cayman S. The more affordable model’s 2.7-liter engine replaces its brother’s 3.2-liter unit.

Standard equipment will include stability control, chest and head airbags, air conditioning, a CD player and Alcantara upholstery. Finishing touches include black brake calipers, black spoiler lips, a trapezoidal tailpipe and black-faced instrument dials to distinguish it from the S.

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