Stuttgart, Germany – The only way to stop the racket is to fully depress the surprisingly stiff clutch. Then, and only then, does all the ruckus from the engine compartment – the rattling clutch release bearing, the gears slapping at one another in rhythm to the engine’s power strokes and God knows what else going on back there – subside.
Only when that unholy din is subdued does the GT3 RS sound anything like the smooth, sophisticated Porsche 911 we’ve all come to know and love.
But sitting in neutral, ticking away at its sub-1,000- r.p.m. idle with not even a hint of the orchestral exhaust music that awaits, the GT3 has already announced it is a race car. Although the ruckus is admittedly slightly attenuated from that of a track-only IMSA car or purebred Le Mans racer, there’s no mistaking all those mechanical grumblings for anything other than a highly tuned machine scrubbed of all unnecessary amenities (the carpeting is shaved to save weight, for gosh sakes), sound-deadening material and anything else not specifically dedicated to wringing every last ounce of speed out of its 4.0-litre highly tuned boxer six-cylinder.
Squint hard enough and the RS’s impatient idle is so authentic the Porsche factory’s parking lot is really Circuit Paul Ricard’s pit lane, the security guard is your pit crew and that uniform he’s wearing is really a Nomex fire retardant suit.
But there’s a third act, one that involves the twin conical aftermarket air filter kits feeding the larger 53-millimetre intake tubes. As the revs stretch for that last 2,000 r.p.m. to the RS’s 8,500-r.p.m. redline, those great honking intakes start making a sucking sound so convincing you start worrying for the poor birds flying overhead lest they get caught in the vacuum and are barbecued atop some high-compression Mahle pistons.
Naturally, all this assumes you have time to pay attention to this aural delight. All the internal-combustion music is the direct result of one seriously breathed-on boxer motor, one Porsche claims is churning out 493 horsepower. That’s the most ever from a normally aspirated 911 motor and within spitting distance of the immortal, twin-turbo-charged Turbo S.
Indeed, Porsche says the GT3 accelerates to 100 kilometers an hour in just 3.9 seconds, a time rendered even more impressive when you consider the RS is only available with a retro-tech six-speed manual gearbox that lacks the launch-control trickery of the Turbo’s PDK tranny.
But, in truth, neither the symphonic engine note nor the acceleration is the big surprise – the former because Porsche’s engines always sound sporty; the latter because even I can read press kits and 493 h.p. driving only 1,360 kilograms of car is always a recipe for ungodly acceleration.
Rather, it’s the amazing tractability of this motor that continued to astound long after I got used to just how quickly it could make the telephone poles fly past. This engine is tuned within an inch of its life.
Porsche didn’t start with its latest high-tech direct-injection boxer six when it created the new GT3 RS, but something called the Mezger engine – posed by the old block design – but to lengthen the stroke rather than bore the cylinders. That means those poor 102.7-mm pistons are traveling an almost Formula One-like 22.8 metres per second when the GT3 spins all the way to 8,500 r.p.m.
Engines like these are supposed to be highly strung beasts, temperamental in their comportment and ready to grenade at the slightest provocation. Instead, the GT3 is a model of civility (apart from the aural cacophony of meshing gears and booming exhaust, is easy. Street-legal it may be, but a daily driver it is not. Besides that stiff clutch, slightly reluctant gearshift lever and all that noise, there’s a suspension as stiff as Mike Huckabee’s speech delivery (the adjustable suspension offers two settings – immovable and intractable), tight-fitting, non-adjustable Recaro sports seats (conventional seats are available as a no-cost option) and brakes more sensitive than a Greek civil servant asked to give up his pension benefits.