This is it, my undoubted star of 2010 - the Porsche 911 GT2 RS: insane, blindingly fast, flamboyant and it goes against everything I've ever said about the 911. Which makes me look a bit of a monkey.
Words: Richard Hammond
This feature was originally published in the Awards issue of Top Gear magazine
A 911 is, I have always believed, a sports car and emphatically not a supercar. Supercars are about looks, image and crazed levels of potency. They are as much about being seen in, as they are for hitting the road and enjoying driving. The 911 is about usable levels of performance, toughness, reliability and a certain unique feel, thanks to the engine still resolutely hanging out over the back, even after decades of honing and polishing the concept. Best of all, it brings enough everyday practicality, subtlety and reliability to give the lucky owner the chance to get out and use one of the best, most purposeful driving machines in the world every day.
The 911 GT2 RS rather falls down on a number of these points. Well, pretty much all of them. There are no back seats, just scaffolding to protect your noggin in case you stick it on its roof. The engine is boosted to 611bhp and 516lb ft by two turbos, and any ideas of mashing your right foot to the floor will result in a lengthy and embarrassing scream at the very least, if not a trip to hell, hospital or Her Majesty's Hotel. The widened arches, huge boot spoiler and chin spoiler resting millimetres off the ground do suggest that you, the driver, perhaps take this sort of thing a bit too seriously. And at a cost of £164k, it's likely most owners will be of an age when they should know better.
The details are fetishistically intriguing. Carbon fibre reinforced plastic (CFRP) has been sprinkled everywhere, from the spoiler lip to the racing-car buckets, and even the fatty old battery has been replaced by a skinnier lithium-ion version. The rear and side windows are plastic (polycarbonate, if we're being posh), the rear suspension arms are now aluminium, and the wheels are specially lightened, and wrap themselves around standard carbon-ceramic brakes. Even the engine mounts are set up to improve stability at super high speed.
There's no stereo or aircon - to save weight. There are no doorhandles on the inside, just cloth straps - to save weight. And the road noise is brutal, largely because of those plastic rear windows - to save weight. And within 10 seconds of firing the thing up and pulling away, I was head over heels in love. This is not a normal 911, not by 70kg of weight loss, not by a very long way. The weight-saving sacrifices are just a tiny part of a programme that has seen the 911 turn into something very different
That apocalyptic, perception-warping engine is a development of the GT2's 3.6-litre, twin-turbo flat-six, hammering power to the floor using only the back pair of wheels - a fact that unsurprisingly means that the GT2 RS is slower to 62mph (3.5secs) than the 4WD 911 Turbo (3.4), even though it has an extra 118bhp. It doesn't feel slower, though. Even though I'm not calibrated to be able to perceive 0.1 of a second, the sheer terror of trying to keep the GT2 RS pointing the right way on a full-bore launch means that the Turbo will always feel like launching a GTI in comparison.
The massive grunt is translated onto the tarmac through a six-speed manual gearbox, which means that this Porsche - like all the 911s fitted with the brilliant manual 'box - makes you feel intimately connected to the car. Sometimes too intimately. First is a kick in the forehead. Second is a thump to the ribcage. Third and fourth, a giant hand pressed against your entire upper body. I suddenly realise the point of a manual gearbox; the gearchanges allow you the opportunity to breathe. If I'm being entirely honest here, it's virtually impossible to find a road long enough to stretch the GT2 RS past fourth gear. It's also not a car you learn in an instant. But it is utterly awe-inspiring. And I mean that quite literally.
Best of all, it's still only two-wheel drive and that's the most important thing that tells you Porsche still knows what makes its cars special. Any two-wheel-drive 911 does the most exquisite, sexy little trick from time to time. On anything approaching full chat, as the car crests even a small lump or rise in the road, it goes lighter at the front end. This is because despite sneaking forwards millimetre by millimetre over the years as though playing ‘Who's that, Mr Wolf?' with the driver, the engine is still firmly between the rear wheels, and so the combination of a crest in the road and power applied takes the weight off the front wheels slightly.
And no, you don't immediately steer into a tree or exit the corner backwards. But, for a fraction of a second, the wheel squirms slightly in your hands, shudders as though cold or thinking of something difficult and comes alive. And that is, for me and thousands of other 911 drivers, the defining characteristic of the car.
Give it 4WD, load up those front wheels with drive-shafts and diffs, and you kill the most subtle, special, magical secret the 911 carries. In the GT2 RS, though, 2WD remains; and with that extra power and weight saving, the effect is magnified. So far from being spoilt, it's actually even more of a 911. Has it become a supercar, then? No, I don't think so. Being realistic, it belongs on the track. On the road, though, it's a very rare thing - a 911 with a massive, ridiculous sense of humour. And what's wrong with that?
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