Greatest Porsche GTs: 718 Cayman GT4 meets 911 GT2 RS and GT3 RS | Autocar heroes

there is a new Porsche Cayman gt4 goody gumdrops this is it and it's the latest in an illustrious line of GT Porsches among which I think probably my favorite is this 911 gt3rs which we'll come to in a moment because there is also the most extreme or certainly the fastest GT Porsche which is the very recent gt2 RS and what I'd like to do today is a test the GT 4 but also test these other two as well see if there are some kind of lineage some kind of bond that links all of these GT portions [Music] okay so welcome to the inside of the gt2 RS which is where we'll start this little back to back test this little auto car heroes really it's one of our series of Heroes videos did a really good McLaren one recently but we do for alongside other news reviews Road testers track tests off-road test track races but if you liked subscribe turn on post notifications you won't miss them and I recommend you do and I want to start in the gt2 RS because it kind of bookends at the very top of things Porsches GT range which is 20 years old this year the very first gt3 came about because Porsche needed to homologate hunnic one suspension component maybe one wishbone for the 911s it wanted to go racing with so created the gt3 model to do it we've got GTS two three and four here today now there was a GT one but it was built and named for a GT one race category in the 1990s and was then fairly crudely homologated as a road car though my water car did interestingly protested anyway we don't have one of these we've got the sensible inverted commas settable GTS two three and four gt2 RS has ever really been considered a sensible car [Music] this generation 911 the 991 went off sale not very long ago and the two is the biggest baddest most absurd 911 there is arguably ever be the gt2 RS comes with a carbon bonnet titanium cage in the back Rose jointed suspension and normally a magnesium roof but this car has the vice Ark package which means it comes with a carbon fiber roof carbon fiber anti-roll bars and magnesium wheels that shave another 30 kilograms from the weight leaving it on our scales fifteen hundred and twenty kilograms win full of fuel the 99 1gt 2 RS is PDK only and has carbon ceramic brakes as standard now if you were to take it crudely you would say well it's a turbo s motor with a wick turned up in the back of the gt3 RS chassis so it's got the most powerful engine in the raciest chassis if you like now there's a bit more to it than that because Porsche is Porsche and it does not do things by halves it always finally owns things to the nth degree but the short of it is that this is the most monstrous engine in the most focused chassis which means a turbocharged 3.8 liter flat 6 so legend behind the rear axle and it makes 700 PS 691 brake horsepower 700 collect record back and the whole car weighs about 1500 kilos so it drives through a 7-speed twin-clutch gearbox when I first drove this car but one brief go in it before we did a video on it and promised that we've returned to it so here we are returning to and I was a bit intimidated by it however I've been driving it a little bit this morning and I've got to say I am absolutely 100% spin with it it's just unbelievably fabulous feats much less intimidating than I thought it was at first you can really just play with it in a way that you would not necessarily think is sensible for a car that has 700 horsepower and the engine out the back and that's the tremendous success of Porsche these days is that they have made the 911 the greatest sports car lineage of all time with a layout that if you were designing a car from scratch today I do not think he would use the rear engine is great for packaging which is why the VW Beetle and Porsches earliest designs have it but take that gt2 we weighed 63% of the weight is over the back wheels racing cars and most supercars have their engines as near the middle as possible either behind the seats or pushed back under the bonnet which reduces inertia and makes a car easier and more willing to turn and gives it a more even weight distribution the 911 gets its unique character its brilliant character both because of and despite the engine location and it's still ultimately incredibly rewarding and yet far more approachable than it should ever need to be absolutely adore this gun is just really brilliant the steering's really quick but there's loes a road feel through even though it's electrically assisted body control is fantastic the ride is OK even though it's on 21 inch wheels at the back with 325 section tires this is over a foot what might eat at the back but there's so much talk and there's so much of you could just great traction on those kind of those wheels all the time [Music] and it's just absurd that you can play with the chassis of a car with this layout and this much power it is DOS I love fashion cities but let's go and try one of the others in this GT series drive my favorite of all GT cars although this is actually giving me forgetting a run for his money right now which is the 997 series gt3 RS right so this is it this is what has been my favorite of the GT porters - they sort of it it's the one where people started to put things rather company together right was that the 99 is that the 99 7.2 gt3 RS which three got it rather than point one which is close to three point six then of course there was the gt3 RS 4 litre which is the one you can't get and now costs half a million pounds etc etc the short of it is this was always the gt3 RS or the GT Porsche that spoke to me the most however having just gotten it from the two RS which has blown me away with how approachable it is how easy it is and yet how involving and engaging it is instantly this car which once upon a time I thought well nothing will ever get close to a car like this in terms of its intimacy and its involvement and its precision well it feels old and not slack just that somehow visibility is better on this theory is that much slower it's another half term between locks on the steering so it feels slightly less precise than the two RS it's only got 30,000 miles on it I don't know they will be hard piles but it's not like this isn't an old classic car where things have started to fatigue it's still as tight as it was there's a cage in the back don't forget keeping the body type that's where the difference lies is that modern cars in disguising their weight and where they're lighter steering just feel more arcadey and more computer gave me so in terms of throwing and round of drifting them especially as they've got so much more power and more talk they become more playable more like a real version of Gran Turismo whereas cars like the gt3 RS of this ilk feel that a little bit more real somehow so on this 997 gt3 RS there is a plexiglass rear screen carbon-fiber rear wing and titanium exhausts that sound absolutely terrific this car has had its air conditioning and radio removed to be the lightest kit can be and of course it gets a manual gearbox so I have to change gears myself and when I do you get that engine the mother of all ages just got a 3.8 liter there were three six versions earlier and for a four liter version I later flat-six making over the only 450 metric horsepower at 4:44 break and it revs to 8 and a half and it makes the power all the way around there and it is such a razor sharp brilliantly responsive engine what's known as the Metzger flat-six engine in this and other pre 991 Series GT 3s has its roots in the 911 gt1 we mentioned earlier this dry-humped unit was first designed as a race engine and here it's being developed out to 3.8 liters which was just before it reached its zenith in the gt3 RS 4 litre the astonishing thing is the way it rents and the key thing is that it's naturally aspirated what engine it is and what are noise it makes the throttle response is just off the scale to match the down shifts you know it's just down to it it's just down to you doing it the PDK isn't doing it you just do the downshift yourself so yeah this car you're going slower than you are at a gt2 RS but I don't think grabbing any less run and you're spending that time extra time you've got doing more stuff more involved in the process but what is interesting about the difference between gt3 and tt-to I used to think that a turbocharged engine would make a car more difficult to play with near its limit because the engine term along with us pulled up and then also it would keep hanging when the rear wheels were spinning if you backed off but actually what I have found is that a turbo engine I think probably makes cars even more playable for that reason so you accelerate now you get the big Slugger talk that spins up the back tires I can send a car sideways and then actually when you lift off because the engine hangs ever so slightly and that torque keeps the rear wheels spinning they come back to spinning a road speed and grip is retained and regained actually more easily sometimes than in a naturally aspirated car where the power is switched on very quickly but there's not necessarily loads of torque to back it up and then as you lift off the rear wheels could come back down to road speed and regain their grip quite briskly which can mean that they're asking harder to play with on the living which is not what I expected when they first came this glut of turbocharged engines so I think actually a gt2 RS is more playful at the living than a gt3 RS despite the fact it's got 700 horsepower 325 section back tires I think it's an easy car to mess around with however don't let that take away anything from this car because in its lightness and actually once you just get used to the fact that the steering is a little bit slower and the engine is that much sharper just becomes a real rewarding less digital or analog precision tool and I like that I was blown away by that gt2 RS I thought yeah that's it this is an astonishingly good car a much better car than I first thought when I drove it very briefly in the wet but the more you get into this I think the more you get out of it three or four weeks ago I said that the McLaren f1 was the greatest car I've ever driven the best car I've ever driven and it is but this is still comfortably in my top five ever it's just that good it's so real it epitomizes for me everything that GT quarters are about so anyway enough of this all right so welcome to the for the gt4 we done - we done three we don't fall now you may notice there are two letters missing in the form and they are R and s they are not insignificant because the Cayman has not had an RS version in fact there was a long time when Porsche would not give to Cayman any more power than an equivalent 911 well now it has its with did so with the last gt4 and it has allowed this one 420 metric 414 break from a four liter flat six so the 718 Cayman has only had a four cylinder turbo to date but as the GT Department bosses do we really look like the four cylinder guys now the engine is not the same generation as the gt2 RS is with the turbos take it off and neither is it a development of any old naturally aspirated engine this is basically the new family of Porsche flat six engines which will find in the 990 - it lives alongside other Porsches six cylinders and this is an engine that can be fitted to all kinds of things in large quantities for a long time to come it revs to 8,000 rpm it gets two petrol particulate filters it can run on three cylinders it is a clean modern efficient flat-six engine [Music] course would be the wrong word but it is certainly not as smooth as the six cylinders in either of the 911s we've got here but hey it is a Cayman with six cylinders at least and it feels strong it's got a lot of torque and it rents to 8,000 it is a much better engine than the previous Cayman gt4 but I'm not sure it is quite as smooth as that cars was and it's certainly not as smooth as the two 911 so what's new about the Cayman gt4 suspension at the front is taken wholesale from the gt3 the rear dampers are inverted and the control arms and subframe are pure gt3 two outside there is a beastly rear wing making 20% more downforce than the last GT Falls and a diffuser carried over from the GT for club sport race car and a front splitter like the gt3 s means the latest GT fault makes 50% more downforce than the previous car but no more drag but what are the chassis well this car feels broad compared to a 3 RS it feels a similar sort of size and in fact in width they are and in terms of its weight it is 2 humming this is pushing 1,500 kilograms so not as heavy as the gt2 RS but heavier than that 997 what I always thought about the Cayman and one of the reasons Porsche declined to give it so much power for a long time is that the engine being in the middle is just the optimum place for a sports car I mean it's why race cars are mid-engine if you put the mast close to the middle that reduces the moment of inertia that makes a car more agile it evens up the weight distribution front and back theoretically you should have a better or at least faster sports car if you put the engine in the middle I mean not right in the middle it's right behind me and in many ways the caimans engine location absolutely works in its favor it's got a really lovely front rear balance and the old Cayman gt4 was one of the most rewarding mid-engine cars I have ever driven this car never feels soggy or heavy but when you've got two RS models alongside it it does feel back bit softer that bit more everyday that bit more approachable relaxed it was a car you would quite happily jump in and drive to a circuit on the continent somewhere in more relaxed fashion than the other two but you would have a lot more fun in the other two when you got them it still feels to me that there is some scope within the GT 4 for something more whereas Porsche is ready to get everything it can out of the 911 it feels like it's still holding something back in the tame and Cayman gt4 RS would be utterly heavenly I strongly suspect what do Porsche GT cars have in common they've all gone I focused in Syria with a brilliant driving position and the driving position is consistently fabulous through all of them where they do have a manual gearbox it's shorter throw and the engine is responsive the pedal weights are all really set up for driving enjoyment by people who just enjoy the sheer process of driving themselves the steering is of varying weights this is about the same sort of speed and weight as that gt3 RS but it's a little bit more relaxed the gt2 RS but they all have a real consist of build up of weight and feel of centre and they all just have a chassis you could just really play around with and I know it's childish and I know it's pure oil when you get a car though it's got this brilliant chassis you just want to drive it beyond its limit of a t-shirt I don't know where the fun in that is it doesn't make any sense to me in the same way that it doesn't make any sense to my mum I just like doing it and a lot of ride and handling engineers like doing it too a lot of people who like cars like doing it but when you get a car that he's good at it beyond its limit it when it's rewarding beyond the limits of grid they also tend to be really well sorted below the limits of grip that's all I can tell you from a purely scientific basis from a purely objective basis a car that's good to slide around in is usually pretty good the rest of the time as well they tend to be the best engineered cars on the planet and GT Porsches RS or not RS 2 3 or 4 ar-rahman thank you for watching if you've enjoyed this check out our McLaren mega test and f1 p1 and Senna on the same track at the same time and if you like that give us a thumbs up subscribe and even turn on post notifications

Channel: Autocar

Views: 799,673

Keywords: autocar, autocar.co.uk, porsche, 718 cayman, cayman gt4, gt4, gt3, gt2, gt2rs, gt3rs, acceleration, flat six, noise, 997, 997.2, 911, carrera, autocar heroes, gt2 rs, gt3 rs, 718, porsche 911, engine, exhaust, drifting, drift, naturally aspirated, turbocharged, flat 6, dual-clutch transmission, 991.2, 991, sports-car, cayman, sports, porsche-gt, porsche-cayman, porsche-911

Id: q4E9sjY8b44

Length: 18min 59sec (1139 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 22 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/IWantRaceCar]

Big Wang GANG

[u/[deleted]]

Man that Miami blue GT2 RS is drool inducing.

[u/gatman12]

Goody gumdrops!

[u/klowny]

Make a GT4RS Porsche!