30 Mar 06
Spend a day driving this thing on road and track, and it really is difficult to find fault with the motor. It pulls from 1200rpm to 8400rpm without perceptible peaks or troughs: it's a touch lumpy at idle, but the suspicion here is that the engine bods at Zuffenhausen did that on purpose to give that race-renegade feel. No need: this feels like a race engine. It yelps through the mid-range in the first three ratios with more force than the last Turbo, a fact borne-out by the claimed performance figures. Anything that dusts zero to 99mph in 8.7sec deserves attention. It does this partly through muscle, partly through shorter 2-6 ratios and is doubtless helped by a short-shift mechanism that reduces the throw by 22 percent over a Carrera.
Porsche has resisted the temptation to go the Aston-Ferrari route with a trick series of valves in the exhaust system. They make extra noise, but the engineers wanted a more organic, less-synthesised sound, and they've nailed it. This sounds like an old 911 because the manifolds exit into one larger silencer box -as on the old cars- to give that baritone burble missing in recent years. There is some harmonic trickery: butterflys that open under specific load and engine speed to bolster the noise, but it doesn't sound artificial.
This is the first GT-badged Porsche to use the company's PASM (Porsche Active Suspension Management) damper system. It offers two suspension settings -the engineers call them sport and super-sport- to cover road and track work. Both are beautifully judged in light of the uncompromising tyre choice.
