Track Weapons

It's V8 vs flat-six, exhibitionist vs perfectionist. Time for two prize fighters to slug it out

- Ollie Kew

Can’t beat a GT3, can you? Seriously. That’s not a rhetorical question. Is it possible to build a superior track-ready, road-legal sports car than Porsche’s two-seater 911? Two German companies have had a go recently. One of them is called AMG. The other, cheekily, is Porsche itself. So they’ve got a head-start. The new GT3, or 991-gen 911 v2.0 if you prefer, conceals a new 4.0-litre flat-six behind some rethought aerodynamics. The facelifted front bumper is droopy-lip ugly, but working in tandem with a steeper rear wing and token diffuser, it squashes the Revenge Of The GT3 into the track – or an unsuspecting road – with the same force as the current GT3 RS. Its naturally aspirated alto of an engine (“engine” seems too uncultured a word for the screaming heart dangling out back) spins to 9,000rpm, and wrings out nigh-on 370kW. And as you might have spotted on a few fleeting internet discussions, you can have a manual gearbox in a GT3 again, swapped in for the irreproachable, insta-shifting paddle shifter at no fee.

Actually, this one’s a long way from the optimum spec of GT3, unless you really, really fancy one as an everyday hackabout. Sure, it’s got the carbon-ceramic brakes, but the squashy electric chairs are too much Carrera, not enough racecar. It simply doesn’t feel purposeful enough not to have to vault over an evil carbon bolster. This one’s got nav, the Bose hi-fi, aircon and no scaffolding blockading the rear window.