Porsche 911 GT2 (2007-) Review

On the road

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If you're ever lucky enough to get your hands on a GT2 - and Porsche will probably only sell 50 or so in the UK over the next two years - please have mercy on your passengers. They will see the car and at first be afraid of all those wings, scoops and slats but the moment they settle down in the cabin they will be lulled into an entirely false sense of security.

The engine doesn't thunder into life, it fires and settles down to a nice even idle that's probably quieter than that of a standard 911 Carrera thanks to the noise-reducing nature of turbochargers. As you pull away, instead of the car pinging off every bump in the road your victim will discover it rides with great composure and even some comfort. As speeds gently rise they'll look around the near enough standard cabin and conclude they had nothing to worry about at all.

But then the devil will take you and you may not be able to avoid burying the throttle in the floor. And it's only then that they'll find this is a 911 like no other ever built. The GT2 - without the traction advantage of the Turbo's four-wheel drive - will get to 100mph in 7.4 seconds and to 62mph in exactly half that time. So if you're lolloping along the motorway at the legal limit and fancy giving your GT2 a bit of a squirt, you are never less than three seconds away from a driving ban.

Find yourself a stretch of road (or, ideally, track) long and legal enough to really stretch its legs and you'll discover a car whose rate of acceleration only slows substantially above 190mph. Given the space it will do 204mph, Porsche says.

Leave the wide open spaces and find some tight, twisty roads and the GT2 continues to impress with eyeball-displacing levels of grip (in the dry at least) and brakes so strong that to stop any faster you'd have to find a wall to drive into. It steers with the utmost precision and is also unreasonably accommodating if you switch off the stability systems and tread too hard in a corner. If the back does start to swing round, and that requires fairly mighty provocation, then you can correct the slide fairly easily with the steering so long as you obey the first rule of 911 driving and do not swiftly snap shut the throttle.

But while the GT2 impresses in all these ways, still it fails to crawl under your skin and infect you with its enthusiasm in the way you might expect of a car costing more than a Ferrari F430. For all its power, the engine has an unremarkable voice and, because it's turbocharged, a very soft reaction to the accelerator. There's always a pause before the thrust is delivered, and that wonderful delicacy of feel as you balance the throttle and the steering through a corner, as found in the naturally aspirated 911 GT3, is notable only by its absence. Truth is, the GT2 is a considerably more blunt instrument than its relentlessly enthusiastic stablemate, which is £50,410 cheaper.