Not sure if anyone actually read the article as the link is bad but here's his arguement for mid-engine vs rear:
"Slack your rope, 911 hangmen. Civilians may wonder what difference the placement of the engine makes. Let me explain.
It has to do with an automobile's center of mass and the effects of acceleration. When cars accelerate - as you might charging out of a corner - the weight of the vehicle transfers rearward, and in rear-wheel-drive cars this increases traction. This is critical, because it really doesn't matter how much horsepower you have, it's how much you can put to the ground.
Unlike front-engine sports cars - which struggle to transfer weight to the rear wheels and inevitably require a compromise in suspension setup, allowing the car to "squat" a little - the rear-engine 911 has its center of mass conveniently situated over the rear wheels. Because the car is more mechanically efficient, the engine can be made smaller and lighter, which reduces overall weight. Less weight means the car changes direction more quickly - less momentum to overcome in any direction. Lighter weight also means less wear on other parts, such as tires, brakes, clutches. A positive spiral of causation.
And yet, for all of these advantages, rear-engine placement is not optimum. The reason: handling. For decades, rear-engined 911s - and Chevy Corvairs and VW Beetles, for that matter - handled awkwardly, like a rubber mallet, weighted heavily on the extreme end. This imbalance made the 911s tricky to control at the limit and occasionally downright spiritual, particularly the turbocharged monsters of the late 1980s. Bumper sticker seen on a 911 whale-tail: "My other car is a tow truck."
In the mid-1990s, with the advent of traction control, stability control and various brake-bias interventions, as well as radical suspension redesigns, Porsche tamed the 911, but never quite quelled the car's antsiness. Especially on cold tires, the 911 can feel snappish and prone to oversteer, and little driver mistakes can invoke the guardian angels of the stability control.
None of this is news to Porsche. But by the 1990s, I contend, the company was hemmed in by its own heritage, compelled by a curious kind of logocentrism to continue the rear-engine format even if it was a pain to engineer around.
THE optimal arrangement is, of course, mid-engine, like the Ferrari F430, Ford GT, as well as Porsche's own Carrera GT and Boxster. Now the center of mass is dead amidships, so that the car pivots, swivels and gimbals from the middle. The Cayman S - with its 291-hp engine, optional 19-inch gumballs and its patently Porsche genetic code - feels like the 911 the company might have built if it hadn't been so enamored of its own rear-engined reflection."
Hmm, makes sense to me and I'm a 911 owner
Here's a correct link and pic from the article:
http://www.latimes.com/classified/automotive/highway1