Porsche GT3

Overview

AFTER driving the T-Hybrid Carrera 4 GTS – which rewrote the rules of what a mid-range 911 could be – it was time to meet its naturally aspirated sibling, the 992.2-generation 911 GT3 with Touring Package.

Where the GTS overwhelmed with manic, electrified thrust that could catch out even the optional all-wheel-drive system, the GT3 Touring promises a purer, more analogue experience delivered through the same bloodline of 4.0-litre flat-six that has powered the most desirable of recent 911s.

Our test car arrived in Slate Grey Neo – a $7870 paint option that oozes understated class, shifting between steely blue and warm grey depending on the light.

Inside, a $28,070 Exclusive Manufaktur two-tone interior in Black and Cohiba Brown leather turned the cabin into something approaching a high-end luggage boutique, with beautifully textured finishes inviting fingers to explore every tactile surface.

This particular car was fitted with the 7-speed PDK (which is a no-cost option on the Touring; the manual is standard), a pair of rear seats, adaptive 18-way sports front seats, the Chrono Package with Porsche Design GT clock, Bose surround sound system and illuminated door sill plates.

Lashings of Exclusive Manufaktur personalisation touches including Crayon decorative stitching, personalised keys and bespoke embossing on the centre console were also part of this car’s epic spec sparing occupants from most – in not all – the Mitsubishi-esque piano black surfaces that cheapen a less carefully optioned 992.2’s cabin.

All up, a $78,450 options bill on top of the $446,700 standard price brought the as-tested total to $525,150 – before on-road costs.

To assess those touring credentials properly, the GT3 was deployed on a Drive Against Depression charity event – long motorway stints from the Sunshine Coast to the Gold Coast bookending a pleasurable drive into the hinterland hills and on to the ambulance museum at Wynnum, with an aspiring motoring journalist fresh out of school riding shotgun.

It also served school-run duties with two children in the back.

That’s a lot of real-world testing for a car without adaptive cruise control.

Drive impressions

Short of the 911 S/T we tested last year – which seems to have inspired more than a little of Porsche Cars Australia’s spec selection of the vehicle tested here – a GT3 is at the peak of the bucket list for disciples of Zuffenhausen and the broader car enthusiast community.

Hell, having access to one for a few days is a pinch-yourself moment even for a jaded motor noter but those dropping the equivalent of an average first home-buyer’s mortgage on one of these deserve to read more than just gushing praise.

Yet the GT3 Touring does so many things so well that picking at its few shortcomings feels almost churlish.

The engine is the centrepiece. Porsche’s motorsport-derived 375kW/450Nm naturally aspirated 4.0-litre flat-six remains a masterwork of engineering that revs to 9000rpm yet pulls 1.5 tonnes of finely honed driving pleasure with tractable, predictable strength from barely above idle.

In sixth gear at 80km/h climbing a hill, it doesn’t protest or stumble – it just gets on with it, which is remarkable for such a highly strung, high-revving unit.

But that’s barely the point. Open the windows and the sound is extraordinary – somewhere between a race car and a high-performance motorcycle, a mournful howl below 4000rpm that becomes gloriously manic as revs build.

It is one of those increasingly rare automotive experiences that Porsche’s investment in synthetic fuels more than justifies preserving.

Compared with the T-Hybrid GTS, which delivers its performance in an almost overwhelmingly instant barrage, the GT3 Touring’s power delivery is way more measurable and progressive.

You can sense the engine’s willingness building through the rev range rather than being hit with everything at once. Corner exits that ended with the hair-trigger GTS dramatically sideways were dispatched by the GT3 Touring with driver-flattering precision and more contained exuberance while that race-bred rear-wheel-drive chassis transmitted every nuance of what each wheel was doing.

Over rippled corner surfaces on the hinterland roads that have become our regular test route, the GT3 Touring held its line without being perturbed, maintaining composure where lesser cars – as well as the hardcore 992.1 GT3 RS – would have been shuffled off their chosen path.

There is a suppleness to the way this GT3 absorbs mid-corner undulations that speaks to the extended wheel travel Porsche has engineered into the 992.2 – 27mm more at the front, 24mm at the rear – and the benefits of helper springs that keep the tyres in contact with the road.

Steering is very light, surprisingly so, but razor-sharp in its accuracy if not as communicative as the rest of the chassis. In Sport mode especially, the nose feels light and eager, the car squatting further rearward as you feed in the throttle in that delightful 911 way.

In this GT3, you can feel the drive being shunted across the rear axle in a way that only truly special cars manage, each wheel telling its own story.

Among a market awash with brute force performance cars that can feel aloof and unexciting at road-legal speeds, it’s refreshing how the GT3 amuses in everyday driving as much as it thrills on a good road.

Surely, this is what you want from a sportscar with ‘Touring’ designation and rear seats.

To that end, the GT3 Touring is almost surprisingly docile around town. Cruising through suburban streets in Normal mode, it settles nicely over speed bumps and feels enjoyably responsive without encouraging undue aggression.

Deployed on school-run duties, the GT3 Touring proved usable if limited. Child seat anchors are fitted (the way the cushion detaches to reveal the ISOFIX points and create vital extra centimetres for accommodating bulky child restraints is genius) and the rear back seats were ample for transporting two children on local trips, but the coupe roofline and steeply arcing rear window created a scalp-roasting greenhouse effect in the Queensland summer sun.

More deeply tinted rear windows or old-school louvres would help; hats were our low-tech solution.

You still get a sizeable frunk sufficient for a mid-week grocery top-up alongside a couple of school bags and the rear seats fold flat independently to provide a useful storage area.

The Drive Against Depression event provided a proper long-haul workout that did more to qualify our test vehicle’s grand touring credentials.

Motorway stints between the Sunshine Coast and Gold Coast, a drive into the hills and the run out to Wynnum demonstrated that this car can cover serious ground without punishing its occupants – at least not unduly.

My young passenger, buzzing from the engine note and the occasion of riding in a GT3, provided a useful reminder that this car’s appeal transcends the perspective of someone who has been fortunate enough to drive quite a few of these things.

That said, to truly put the “touring” in GT3 Touring, Porsche needs to address the driver assistance deficit.

No adaptive cruise control, no blind-spot monitoring and no lane-keep assist beyond the basic system. For a car that costs more than half a million dollars in this configuration and explicitly positions itself as the daily-drivable GT3, these omissions may be purist-friendly and save a few kilograms for a couple of hundredths off your lap time but still puzzling.

A long motorway stint was noticeably more tiring than it needed to be, and not just because of the road noise.

Speaking of which, this is an innately firm and communicative car. High-speed journeys are accompanied by the patter of road debris battering around the wheel arches, and on coarse-chip surfaces the wall of sound from those 255/35/20 front and 315/30/21 rear tyres crowds your attention.

There’s also a low-frequency boom and, in our test car, an occasional buzz from somewhere around the rear luggage area at certain engine speeds that intruded on an otherwise special cabin ambience.

Understandably for a car you can drive to the track, on the track, and back home again, the GT3’s brakes require some warmth before feeling truly progressive. Cold, they are somewhat binary but once up to temperature they offer the kind of positive and predictable pedal feel you’d want in a car of this calibre.

Whether scrubbing speed or really standing on the anchors, the PDK instantly drops the right number gears, ready to get back on the power. It’s a such beautifully integrated response that you can almost sense every hour of careful calibration work that went into it.

On the subject of the PDK, there were some jerky gear changes when both transmission and engine were cold. Once warmed through, it is an incredibly satisfying unit that frees up your concentration for steering and feeling and experiencing, as the seven-speed unit snaps through its ratios with purpose.

The customisation options are extensive: Sport and Track modes each allow individual configuration of PDK behaviour as well as exhaust, rear spoiler, chassis stiffness and stability system settings.

Switching into Track mode transforms the GT3 Touring into something so noticeably more aggressive that Sport seems somewhat tame.

Maybe we were imagining it but the transmission seemed to gain a race box-like whine as the dampers firmed considerably and the whole experience heightened to the point that it felt like a different machine altogether.

We’d been tempted to avoid this setting on public roads, but with the option to keep stability and traction control still active, it remained usable if a bit raw for your average Aussie backroad.

It was a reminder that some cars are just better suited to a racetrack, and on the public road – scuppered repeatedly by trucks and battered hatchbacks during our test – the GT3 Touring’s true potential remained frustratingly out of reach.

For those who are interested in supercar fuel consumption, our example hovered around 13.6 litres per 100km during our time with it – which included motorway cruising, spirited hinterland driving and local errand-running – with the 63-litre tank showing less than 300km of range on a full fill before settling to a more realistic figure once cruising speeds were established.

Here’s where the hand-wringing starts, though – and this has been building since the hybrid GTS. Having driven the previous GTS, GT3 RS (which donated several of its technical goodies to this new GT3), the S/T and now the 992.2 versions of both the GTS and GT3 Touring, it feels impossible not to ask whether the 992.1 represented peak Porsche.

Don’t misunderstand – the GT3 Touring is a phenomenal car. That engine alone justifies its existence in a way that no turbocharged or electrified unit can replicate. The chassis is deeply talented, the interior in this specification is stunning, and on the right road it provides a level of interaction, tactility and sensory experience that puts it among the very best cars we’ve driven.

‘Among’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting there because the first 992 had just the right amount of everything in the right measure, something this updated car and its T-Hybrid GTS counterpart haven’t quite replicated for us.

The GTS felt like it had gone too far in one direction; the GT3 Touring, while more measured, didn’t deliver the same lightning-bolt moment previous iterations on the same roads.

Perhaps it’s familiarity. Perhaps it’s the tyre pressures – which too late into our test we realised were at around 40psi and may have contributed to some of the front-end skittishness and surprisingly numb steering we encountered.

Or perhaps Porsche started running out of money during development of the 992.2?

It’s hard to ascertain whether this GT3 Touring stands as one of the last of a breed as environmental rules seem to get less ambitious – which sounds like good news for enthusiasts but is savaging car-maker balance sheets as they scramble in reaction to what feels like an increasingly distant electric future.

The naturally aspirated engine at the heart of cars like this GT3 may yet continue to exist in some form, but this combination of analogue purity and modern chassis sophistication feels like something to savour while we can – but for more complex reasons than anyone could’ve predicted.

Still, in return for an extraordinary amount of money this GT3 Touring was an extraordinary car in which to escape existential thoughts.

We just wished it had blown us away as completely as its predecessors did.