Porsche 911 GT3

Sitting atop the hard-core branch of the sprawling Porsche 911 hierarchy, the $178,250 GT3 RS seemed a great candidate for some testing of its track-day mettle. So we spent three consecutive days pushing it to its limits—and sometimes slightly beyond—at our tenth Lightning Lap competition at Virginia International Raceway (VIR), before hopping back into its carbon-fiber bucket seat for the 700-mile trek back to our Ann Arbor, Michigan, office. We then put it through our full battery of performance tests. Almost more surprising than its admirable performance at the track—planted, predictable, and consistent, with a lap time among the top 10 of the more than 200 vehicles we’ve now run at Lightning Lap—was its unexpectedly forgiving ride quality on the street.

Ever larger and heavier, with more luxury accoutrements, the latest, 991 generation of the 911 has lost some of its dynamic purity. Anyone who’s driven a previous-gen 911 (997) back to back with the latest-issue 991 will agree that some of the steering’s sharpness and immediacy has been lost. The GT3 RS, however, dials back in all of that directness and then some, via stiffer powertrain mounts, dampers, and suspension components, as well as overall weight loss. And sure enough, the steering wheel dances and twitches over undulating roads in a way that’s been lost in most modern sports cars.Speaking of purity, this particular, exceptionally stripped-down example is closest to the original RS’s ethos, even if it’s not how customers typically order Porsches—even GT3 RS models. Porsche basically built this one specifically to compete at Lightning Lap, and it has all the weight-saving options and almost no luxury add-ons. Although it’s odd to see any car pushing $200,000 that’s lacking a leather-covered dash, at 3155 pounds this GT3 RS is 137 pounds trimmer than the loaded car we ran in a comparison test earlier this year. Even as it has grown in every dimension, that curb weight, impressively, is 25 pounds lighter than our 997 GT3 RS test car from 2007.