Tag: [w/video]

Filed under: Coupe, Performance, Videos, Porsche, First Drives, Racing

The Bearable Lightness Of Being

Start with a standard Porsche 911 Carrera and its 350-horsepower, 3.6-liter flat six-cylinder engine. Bore a crepe-thin slice of aluminum from each cylinder to get to 3.8 liters, add a wider track out back and two extra exhaust pipes and voila, you can append an S to the Carrera’s name. Hang two sets of wet, multi-disc clutches along its spine and you can make that a 4, or a 4S. Bolt on two forced-induction compressors and piping, add two fender vents and comically wide rear tires and you’ve redeemed your ticket to a Turbo. Increase the boost pressure and swell the corral to 560 horses and you have the Turbo S, which is the Virginia Slims of the 911 line-up because it’s come a long way, baby.

Or you can go in a different direction. At that second stop, grab the 3.8-liter and cart it over to the engineers at Porsche’s development center in Weissach, Germany. If racing were meat, they would be among the alpha carnivores. The baseboards in their homes are probably painted with miniature billboards for motor oil and vintage cigarettes along the straights, red-and-white stripes around every corner.

Instead of watching them add things to the 911, watch them take away. They will subtract the kinds of things you can feel in your hands, like components and weight and mass. By doing that, they will add the things you can feel in your butt and your gut, like acceleration and handling and thrill.

That has been the formula for the previous four generations of the 911 GT3, and it is that same incantation chanted over this fifth generation 991-based GT3. It’s stiffer, more powerful, faster and handles better than the coupe that came before it. It weighs more than the outgoing model, but it also – as we’ve come to expect – has more power.

And when Thomas Jefferson’s line “Every generation needs a revolution” was the opening quote of the press conference that introduced the 2014 911 GT3, the easy explanation would be that the speaker was referring to the coupe’s advances. But we’re pretty sure he was answering the question everyone’s been asking since the words “PDK-only” began being applied to the car: “What in Gott‘s name have you done with my manual transmission?”

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2014 Porsche 911 GT3 [w/video] originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 01 Aug 2013 11:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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