If you spend about eighteen grand in a new car, you’ll end up with a reasonably equipped (if perhaps labeled as a base model) subcompact. If you spend that same amount of money on options on a mid-size car, you’ll end up with pretty much all the kit you could ever possibly want. Spend it on a Porsche 911 Carrera S and…well, they kinda figure that if you’re spending a hundred grand on a car, it’s pretty much chump change you carry around for parking tickets or something.

You know how one of the oldest dining tips in the book is to pick the second-cheapest wine on the list? The Carrera S is proof that the adage  is also true when picking 911’s, as it may just be the perfect balance of all the ingredients in the Porsche cupboard. A The GT3 may be faster, stiffer and more track-ready and the Turbo will happily sit at 198 MPH provided of a straight Autobahn. But for the normal “I just want a Porsche and I don’t live near snow” crowd, the S will provide them with a perfect everyday exotic. However, if you want more performance and you’ve glossed over the existence of the 911 GTS in the middle of all the variants of 911 you can get you don’t have to worry, because Porsche has bestowed it’s second cheapest 911 with what they call “Carrera S Powerkit.”

All power comes at a price of course, and the price of this powerkit is an eye-watering $17,800. That’s $1505 more than a similarly equipped Carrera GTS but my oh my do you get some impressive modifications for your gigantic pyramid of money. The power jumps from 400 to 430 Horsepower just like in the GTS, the Sport Chrono package like the GTS, the sports exhaust system of the GTS and…Wait a tick…

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Porsche will gladly make your Porsche 911 Carrera 2 into a GTS. Only that a bit more expensive and missing some stuff like the exclusive rims, the Porsche Active Suspension Management ($890 on top of the eighteen grand)The blacked out rear intake and the widebody effect. I’m not sure if that makes the people in charge of deciding how much everything on the options list cost at Porsche brilliant or decidedly evil. I think the answer is ‘yes’. And we haven’t got to the best bit yet.

If we work on the assumption that the person who would drop such an amount of money on this options pack is equally interested in driving performance and bragging rights (I know, big big assumption to make when it comes to this sort of things), won’t he be a bit disappointed when he sees that all his money has bought him (according to the blurb Porsche themselves put on the configurator) exactly 0.1 of a second in the ever-so-important 0-60 brag competition. A 0.1 that, incidentally, they’d also get from the GTS. And if he messes up a tiniest little bit launching the car to verify it indeed can do 0-60 he may aswell have spent his money going on holiday or buying a new Honda Fit.

Really, any future Porsche 911 owner that buys this pack for their Carrera can fall into three categories: unaware of the existence of the GTS, just picked the really cool one they had at the dealer or “Upsold by a Porsche sales representative”. The fourth possible group, “People that want a sleeper version of the GTS” strikes me as so small it wouldn’t actually register if you made a pie chart.

Quite frankly, there’s a much better way to drive up the price of your Porsche: leather. You can easily spend more than ten grand making sure absolutely every surface on the interior of your Porsche is covered with the hides of the very finest cows that Stuttgart can get its hands on. The Door panels, the PCM surround, the center console, the rear center tunnel, the instrument surround. Not even the fuse box cover will have to suffer the injustice of being finished in lesser materials. And, if you’re spent that much money in leather surely you’ll be able to pay someone to come around once a year and spend a couple of days giving it maintenance.