At this spring’s Geneva motor show, there were crowds fighting to snap pictures of the newest fast cars from Ferrari, Lamborghini, and McLaren. Over at the Porsche stand, a drop-dead gorgeous 911 GT3 sat in relative solitude, receiving only passing, disapproving glances.
The proverbial pitchfork-wielding Porsche purists weren’t pissed just because the new car no longer uses the Le Mans-winning Metzger engine found in all previous GT3s. No, the nail in the newest Porsche’s coffin of public opinion was that it will be available only with an automatic transmission. Which is, by the way, no different from the crowd-pleasers over at Ferrari, Lamborghini, and McLaren.
“I don’t get this stone-age idea about what a 911 should be,” grunts Andreas Preuninger, the man responsible for Porsche’s GT cars, at Porsche’s rain-dampened proving grounds the next day. “With the first GT3, they were practically throwing rocks at me because it didn’t have an automated-manual transmission, which was where all the hype was at the time. But those transmissions weren’t very good. Now, the GT3 gets a perfect [twin-clutch automatic] and everyone is screaming for the manual.”
We admitted that, this time, we were part of the screaming. The GT3, was the 911 that offered the least of what techno-crazed Germans would call “progress,” but as a result, it led the sports-car world in terms of driving experience. It was the rawest, purest expression of all everything that defines the 911—right down to its detuned race motor and wrist-breaker of a manual shift lever.
“Ugh, God, you’re one of them!” cries Preuninger, rolling his eyes. “Just shut up and drive the thing.”
The new GT3 starts up with a bark no less intense than that of the old car, The interior buzzes with excitement at idle, the engine’s variable-stiffness magnetorheological engine mounts clearly not tuned for comfort. When you start out from a stop, there’s an overabundance of revs, noise, and clutch slippage. Our test car is a pre-production prototype, but if Porsche has any sense, the transmission’s programming will stay this way.
Moving off, as you’re paying attention to the clutch engagement, something else grabs your attention: the steering snaps to life. This doesn’t happen in a regular 911, with which the GT3 shares its steering hardware. It took Preuninger’s team over two years of programming work before he was happy with the electrically assisted steering; he wanted the driver to feel everything the car’s tie rods experience. This is doubly good news: It means that the GT3 has steering reminiscent of older Porsches, but it’s also an indication that there’s hope for the regular, numb-helmed 911. And the Boxster/Cayman, both of which use similar equipment.
Regardless, cruising at U.S.-highway speeds on Porsche’s track, the GT3’s steering isn’t quite as talkative as a 997’s, but given how the base Carrera feels, it’s a miracle that it talks at all. And the steering’s weighting is genuinely natural when you turn into a corner. On this slick surface, we could almost criticize the steering for not communicating enough as the front tires lose adhesion. Except the rear tires let go at the same time. Understeer is nowhere to be found; at the limit, the car goes neutral. Stability control is very lenient, interfering only when the driver doesn’t correct as quickly as the rear wheels come around. And when Preuninger, sitting in the passenger seat, switches the system off with a devilish laugh, the GT3 becomes as throttle-steerable as every GT3 before it.
Then there’s the active rear steering. Frankly, Porsche’s marketing department should have left that out of the press conference—you’ll never know it’s there. Only an idiot would describe the previous GT3’s reactions as ponderous, but the old car did take a moment to settle into a corner, especially at the rear. The new car turns in instantly and as a whole—and with none of the artificial feeling imparted by the regular Carrera’s optional active anti-roll system. Preuninger meant it when he told us to shut up and drive: Even the sharpest purist rhetoric falls apart when, from behind the wheel, the GT3 feels exactly like a 911, just better.
And don’t bother crying over the disappearance of the Metzger motor. This car uses what is effectively the same 3.8-liter block as the Carrera S, but that tremendously oversquare engine’s bore and stroke dimensions are each within a millimeter of the Metzger’s.
The new engine hits its power peak where the old one hit its rev limiter. It redlines at 9000 and makes 475 hp from just 3.8 liters. Shut up, indeed.
Along with additional oiling capability, the GT3 engine uses titanium connecting rods and forged-aluminum pistons. Its cylinder heads have been substantially reworked for high-rpm duty, including nerd-porn finger-followers that incorporate hydraulic valve-lash adjustment. Happily, this six isn’t as soft in the low range as its 6250-rpm torque peak would suggest. It lives to rev, though we had to fight the instinct to shift shy of redline. That’s probably because our ears have never before been treated to the sound of a nine-grand flat-six in a street car, but forward thrust eases noticeably in the 750 rpm between the horsepower peak and the redline. Noise, however, does not—the GT3 emits a pained wail that could send a Ferrari 458 searching for the nearest exit, together with a high-pitched whine from the transmission’s hydraulic pump.
To grab the next gear, you can pull one of the steering-column paddles, which feel heftier than those of a regular 911. Or, if you’re in the middle of a turn, sideways and arms crossed up, you’ll want to use the console shifter, because the paddles aren’t fixed to the steering column. And there’s even more good news: By reversing the shift pattern, Porsche has finally admitted—without actually admitting anything—that its Tiptronic (torque-converter automatic) and PDK (dual-clutch) shift levers have been backward for years. The GT3’s lever now operates like a sequential race ’box, with a push forward for a downshift and a pull for an upshift.
The seven-speed transmission contains revised gearing compared with the regular 911. Every single ratio is different, as is the final drive. A calculator workout, however, proves that while the ratios are much shorter overall, the GT3’s additional 1200 rpm makes up for the gap. The GT3’s maximum speeds in gears one through five are nearly identical to a Carrera S, but sixth and seventh are over TK PERCENT shorter. Fuel economy will likely suffer, but we don’t care, and you shouldn’t, either.
More imporant, the GT3 hits its top speed in top gear (and at just over 8000 rpm), where other PDK-equipped Porsches do the deed in sixth. The GT3 also reacts more quickly to shift requests than does the regular 911, and Preuninger even installed a clutch-dump function—pull both paddles in any gear, at any speed, and the engine will freewheel. Let them go, and drive will gently reengage If you’re in Sport Plus mode, the gearbox will unceremoniously dump the clutch. Why?
“I wanted to make sure I can still do a burnout when I pull up next to a Prius at a red light,” Preuninger says. The man is quickly approaching sainthood.
Alas, the GT3 wouldn’t need the Prius-Paddle function if it had a real clutch pedal. Hearing this—again*—Preuninger’s chiseled face drops.
“The manual-versus-PDK argument was the most discussed point [during development], and we only made the decision to go with the PDK last August. This is genuinely the first time a flappy-paddle gearbox is satisfying to me. PDK takes away the clutch, which is the interface between man and machine*. I admit that. But it gives back more. Every shift of the manual-transmission car loses almost a half car-length [on acceleration]. That means after three shifts, the [automatic] GT3 can pass a manual GT3 and pull safely in front of it.”
To which we couldn’t help but respond, “yeah, a GT2 or an automatic Turbo could do that, too.”
The crux of the issue is that there’s a fundamental difference between speed-obsessed German engineers and good ol’ silly Americans who just love to drive a manual. For the former group, there’s a point at which the automatic is faster and can be programmed to be more efficient. It then becomes “better.” To the rest of us, it merely becomes a better automatic. And while the GT3’s PDK is one of the better automatics, there is not, nor will there ever be, an automatic that is as involving as a manual. Now that the 911—like so many other cars—has traded a degree of involvement for speed, we’d happily lose time on the sprint to 60 mph or a few seconds a lap if it meant more fun.
But rather than lay all the blame on Preuninger and his team, maybe we’re partially at fault. There was a time where most enthusiasts and journalists seemed to view the dual-clutch automatic as the second coming of the gearbox. After living with them for a decade, they just feel like automatics.
Allow us to apologize on behalf of an entire industry for that false alarm: we were wrong. We don’t care about shaving tenths off our 0-to-60 runs. We want to work for our lap times. We’re bored to death behind the wheel and we want to work with a shift lever and a clutch pedal.
Perhaps those Germans also can admit they made a mistake. No need to apologize for the direction of the shift lever or the regular 911’s lack of steering feel—those are now fixed. You have to hope that, at some point in the future, Porsche will release a Mea-Culpa-Edition GT3 with a six- or seven-speed manual. In the meantime, we’ll just have to enjoy the version we’ve got. Which—if you’ll shut up and try driving it—is one hell of a consolation prize.
