30 Mar 06
You see, Porsche only wants to sell this car on its UHP tyre (another flaming acronym, this time Ultra High Performance tyre). It's a version of the Michelin Pilot Sport Cup tyre, ostensibly a cut slick that has been completely reconstructed for this car alone. Somehow, they've managed to make it comfortable on the road, but optimised the suspension geometry and reduced the locking action of the limited slip differential (back from 40 percent to 28 percent under power) to allow it to pull something over 1.4g lateral acceleration. This puppy sticks. Predictably, for a GT3, once you get to a good, smokey slip-angle, the car has more inherent balance than a spider that just won the world arachnid trapeze championships.
But making a faster, stickier GT3 was the easy aspect of the 997 variant. Translating a 6sec-faster Nurburgring lap time over version-996 (using the softer suspension-setting to score roughly 7min 43sec, should you want to replicate it) into a comfortable usable road car required some level of alchemy. Hard-liners will grizzle, but the GT3 can now be had with sat-nav, a telephone, and heated sports seats. Even loaded with comfort gear, it weights 15kg less than before. The damping, with the softer mapping, takes all the sharp edges away and even though there's more head-toss than in any regular 997, this is a usable everyday car. That could pitch at an endurance race and beat most everything in the paddock.
That alone pitches the 997 GT3 right up the ladder of Porsche greatness. Because its skill-base is so wide, it has a cleaner hereditary link to the great 2.7RS than any fast Porsche sold in the US in the last thirty-three years. No wonder Walter is making the switch.
