First Drive: 2011 Porsche Cayenne Turbo sheds 4,177 Twinkies – and it shows



01poschecayennefd2011opt1 First Drive: 2011 Porsche Cayenne Turbo sheds 4,177 Twinkies   and it shows

Imagine, for a moment, that the Porsche engineering team has dropped 4,177 individually wrapped Twinkies on the lab floor. The yellow cream-filled sponge cakes are scattered shin-deep across the smooth ceramic tiles and kicked into the corners by technicians wearing white lab coats as more hit the floor. Individually, the cakes aren’t very heavy. However, add 4,177 of the treats together and they weigh nearly 400 pounds.
Those thousands of Twinkies represent the average weight removed by Porsche on its all-new 2011 Cayenne. Thanks to a massive diet, the automaker’s SUV emerges as a toned athlete – and we just spent two days flogging it on the track and off-road course at Barber Motorsports Park in Alabama. What’s under its fresh new skin, and where did all that weight go? How does the Cayenne perform on the track? Just as importantly, has it lost its off-road capabilities? Find out this and more after the jump.