For the well-heeled and well-connected, the 911 GT3 Touring represents something of a high water mark for Porsche. Nothing else offers quite the same kudos, combining the GT Department’s dedication to natural aspiration and race-derived engineering with a sophistication and subtlety that it normally abandons in favour of enormous wings and louvres. But I wonder if there’s a danger in trying to be too many things for too many people; that, in aiming for the ultimate, you actually end up with compromise.
To justify this outrage, I need to go back to the last time I drove a GT3. It was a 991.2, in white, complete with massive wing, deep bucket seats, Alcantara on everything you didn’t need to see through and even a half cage. I spent a long summer’s day in that car and, when I returned it to Porsche’s HQ in Reading at close to midnight, I was exhausted. Hands shaking, ears ringing, I struggled to get out of the car almost as much as I struggled to hand over the keys. It had been more than memorable. Truly unforgettable, it turns out.
A good couple of years have elapsed since, and the arrival of the 992 has moved the game on in ways too numerous to list and, in many respects, too complicated to even unpick. The 992 is a highly advanced sports car, with a stiffer monocoque using vastly more lightweight aluminium and a wider track front and rear for even greater grip and traction. But some of the fundamentals are largely unchanged. The 4.0-litre flat-six, excepting the addition of individual throttle bodies and a lighter rear silencer to offset the mandated particulate filters, is basically what you got in the last 991 GT3. Porsche has squeezed a fraction more power and torque from the unit, with 503bhp and 347lb ft now arriving at 8400 and 6100 revs respectively. The six-speed manual derived from the 911R and unique to the GT3 is the same too, although a seven-speed PDK is also now available.
Where the wizards of Weissach have sprinkled most of their magic is on the suspension, aero and kerb weight, this last being so impressively pegged back thanks to things like carbon panels and lighter glass that it weighs barely any more than the old car despite being considerably larger.
The new GT3 also received a swan-neck rear wing, looking like it was straight off a Cup car, and complex underbody diffusers that dramatically increased downforce. Coupled with ball-jointed double-wishbones on the front suspension for the first time on a 911 road car, this was a highly evolved trackday tool whose blistering pace, grip and precision asked serious questions of our narrow, bumpy and congested road network.
So where does this leave the Touring, the most heavily motorsport-influenced road-going 911 to date, dressed down for the daily grind? It sounds brilliant on paper and, in many respects, it lives up to that most basic premise. Declawed in a visual sense, the GT3 still has an impressive, almost intimidating poise but combines that with a modest uptick in class. Inside, our car was fitted with carbon-backed bucket seats which seemed counter-intuitive in a car with heavy road bias, but the motorsport styling cues were otherwise pared back – most noticeably with the harder-wearing leather trim of the steering wheel. Fired up, the Touring still delivers that delicious bark from the exhaust before settling into a menacing baritone hum. It’s an engine note that, even at idle, leaves no illusion as to the legacy and potency of a Boxer engine that comes almost unaltered from Carrera Cup.
On a Black Mountain test route comprised of narrow straights, blind hairpins and thick fog, it’s a car that conforms to the modern cliché of appearing to shrink around you, a facet of fast and precise steering and good visibility. Despite its imposing stance and soundtrack, confidence in the GT3 Touring builds quickly and, after driving the same section of road a few times, enormous depths soon reveal themselves.
In terms of performance, there’s always more than either the road or your own courage can cope with, and you wonder how custodians of the extra 150bhp in a Turbo S ever manage to deploy anything close to full throttle. And what’s interesting about the GT3, having driven so many twin-turbo 911 variants of late, is how much you have to go looking for the power. At 4000rpm, it doesn’t feel like much is going on at all. By 8500rpm, it’s like you’ve gate-crashed God’s own disco. I’m going to stick my neck out and say that the steering feels more artificial than the 991 GT3, long ago as that drive was. The change of direction is like nothing this side of a Caterham, but there is an absence of information through the wheel. And the brakes, steels in this instance, are in need of a generous application of pedal, so I wonder if the immediacy of bite from the expensive ceramic option isn’t worth the money.
While we’re heaping criticism onto what is unequivocally one of the great sports cars of the age, the ride quality and fidgety-ness of the GT3, a price worth paying on a track-oriented weekend toy, seem at odds with the idea of a car with ‘Touring’ in the title. So too the tyre noise that besets all modern 911s. Not much anyone can do about that.
The cabin feels more refined than I remember of that last GT3; the mechanical clatter of engine transmission more muted, the roar of exhaust less overwhelming. All of which suggests that the Touring still narrowly hits the mark in being a more liveable version of the standard GT3, but the gains really are marginal. The car still looks fairly outlandish, with those unmissable nostril air intakes and meaty front and rear spoilers. It’s also still a hard-riding, highly focussed track car underneath, and one that you have to dig the performance from rather than have it served up in any gear, as with the more understated and tractable Turbo S.
Regardless, as the future of ICE becomes ever more fragile, the GT3 Touring is assured its status as one of the last great combustion cars. Porsche is preparing the 911 for hybrid drive and, while it doggedly defends the purity of its GT cars, legislation and public mood mean this generation could be the last. And with that thought, and for the same £127,820, I think I’d rather sign up for all the bells and whistles of a regular GT3 – all the downforce, all the drama, raw and outlandish and unapologetic to the last.