A First-Hand Experience Of The Porsche 911 GT3 Touring

When it comes to hunting down the perfect car, a parallel can be drawn to hunting down the perfect watch. Ignoring stuff like budget and availability, have you ever thought about what your perfect watch would be like? What size and shape would it be, what does it need to do, what type of movement do you want, what colour or decoration are you thinking of? With cars, it’s pretty much a similar story. By now, you’re probably well aware we’re fans of the Porsche 911 and have regularly covered new editions and driven a couple of them as well. But with a range that feels like a Christmas Catalogue at times, which one is best? The simple answer is to test them all, but that feels a bit of a stretch. However, we’ve recently got to experience the 992.2-gen 911 GT3 Touring, and quite frankly, it is a brilliant machine. Yet it’s not perfect, which we’ll explain in our latest hands-on driving test!

The sole reason we started our weekly car column, The Petrolhead Corner, is that Frank, Brice and yours truly are avid car guys and we felt it would be a cool little breather during the weekend from all the watch news. Personally, I have been a fan of motorsports and particularly Endurance Racing and Formula 1 for over thirty years, have collected hundreds of scale model cars in my childhood and have had numerous magazine subscriptions over the years. One car always stood out to me a bit more than others, and that is the iconic Porsche 911. Honed to perfection over generations, much like a Rolex Submariner if you want to compare it to watchmaking, the 911 is (to me at least) the quintessential sports car.

But actually driving one seemed out of reach, until a couple of years ago, when I was handed the key to the mad 911 Dakar for a whole week! Since then, Frank and I have driven quite a few variants of the 911, like the GTS, the 911 T, the GT3, and so on. For a quick rundown of all the 911s we’ve had and shared our experience with, here’s a quick little summary.

• Porsche 911 4S Convertible
• Porsche 911 Dakar
• Porsche 911 GTS vs 911 T
• Porsche 911 GT3
• Porsche 911 Carrera 2.7

Throughout all of this, the incredible diversity of the 911 platform becomes very evident. Porsche has built lord-knows-how-many variants by now, each one being slightly different from the next. The current range begins with the 911 Carrera (394bhp, naturally-aspirated, rear-wheel drive) and tops out with the new 911 Turbo S, which packs an almighty 711bhp punch (more on that in The Petrolhead Corner soon!), all built around that rear-mounted flat-six philosophy. But the subtle differences are not defined solely by power output. And that raises a question: which 911 is the perfect 911? The easiest way to find out is to get behind the wheel of as many of them as possible, and the latest Frank and I got our hands on is this 992.2 GT3 Touring.

same-same, but different

To make sense of what the GT3 Touring actually is, it’s important to understand the essence of the GT3 moniker in the 911 lineage. The GT3 is a hardcore, track-focused take on the 911, drawing direct inspiration from Porsche’s GT3 race cars. The engine is a high-revving 4.0-litre naturally aspirated flat-six, pumping out 510bhp to the rear wheels only. The suspension is stiffer and more focused for the track, the gearbox has shorter ratios, you get a ton of finely-tuned aero bits, and on the inside, there’s an (optional) roll cage, no back seats and lightweight bucket seats. If all this isn’t enough and you really want to go mad, the 911 GT3 RS ups this all with 525bhp, a more extreme aero pack and an even stiffer set-up. And then there’s the GT3 Touring….

What makes a GT3 Touring is the fact that it’s a slightly subtler, more docile GT3. Gone is the massive fixed rear wing, and in comes a retractable wing and a little more refinement for everyday use. And by little, I really do mean a little, as it’s still a GT3 after all. The engine is similar, yet has a slightly lower 0-100kph acceleration time and slightly higher top speed. The GT3 will hit 100kph in 3.4 seconds, versus 3.9 seconds for the GT3 Touring, and the top speed is 311kph versus 313kph, respectively. Yet you still get that incredible scream as you push the flat-six engine to its 9,000 rpm redline, though, which is absolutely intoxicating! On the inside, it’s again somewhat less hardcore with a leather-wrapped steering wheel instead of a Race-Tex-covered one. And if you want, you can even get back seats to scare the kids every now and then.

All The Good Bits, And Some Bad…

You’d think the GT3 Touring is pretty flawless, but it’s not exactly perfect on all accounts. While it’s absolutely brilliant on the road, it can be a bit much for daily use. I can best describe it as the energy of a Jack Russel paired with the power of a Pitbull. It’s a car that’s very tightly wound, and one that’s always eager to go harder and faster. Throw it into a corner, and it will eat it for breakfast and ask for seconds. And to be honest, it’s a definite sensation driving the GT3 Touring, but Frank and I will get to that in a bit.

The bad bits of the GT3 Touring lie in the fact that it’s not the most practical car for daily use. It’s very stiff, so if the road is less than smooth, you’re in for a bouncy ride to the point it becomes annoying, and even off-putting. The cup holder and door compartments are either in the wrong place or too small, which particularly frustrated Frank. I, on the other hand, had an issue with the wireless charging dock in the armrest. While it perfectly accommodates today’s smartphones, it’s a very low space where it sits, with no ventilation. On numerous occasions, my phone simply got too hot because of it, which isn’t ideal. And if you want to put the kids in the back, the seat can be folded forward, but it doesn’t slide forward automatically, nor does it return to its original position, so it’s always a multi-step process.

So what is it like to drive?

Since Frank and I both drove the 911 GT3 Touring for a couple of days, and have experience in other 911s as well (with Frank daily-driving a 997.1 Carrera S manual), we thought it would make sense to each shed our light on this one from our own perspective.

Frank: “What a machine! For starters, I love naturally aspirated flat six engines and this one delivers more than I could have dreamt. Similar to the GT3 with Weissach pack that we recently had for a review. This 4.0-litre engine wants to go, is eager and sort of teases you, or challenges you, to put your right foot down. The howl that follows, when it hits higher revs, is simply awesome. You can almost feel that howling sound through your spine! So doing something stupid is certainly a possibility, as this machine is so powerful, and acceleration is so quick. And be aware of speeding tickets… that’s a bit of the downside of the GT3.

I’m not the person to take my 911 out for a drive on a Sunday morning. I drive it (almost) every day. And this GT3 Touring, like the ‘normal’ GT3 with massive rear wing, are probably both a bit too much of a tease to me, and I find it really hard to drive normally, so without the occasional moment when you put your foot down, just for the fun of it. The GT3 Touring is maybe a tad softer than the ‘normal’ GT3, but not much. When driving in my area, or into the street where I live, my back suffers… That hard chassis that makes driving so much fun has a downside, and it’s noticeable when driving on less smooth roads, cobblestone roads or small countryside roads (where you might have to go off the road to avoid a big tractor).

And there’s the cup holder… gosh, I just loved the old cup holders, both tucked away in the dashboard on the passenger side. Now it’s replaced by a fixed one in the centre console; it’s impractical, to say the least. Since I drive my 911 as a daily, I always have a bottle of water, or something like a coffee, in the cup holder. In the centre console, it’s more or less in the way of where you put your arm. While this GT3 Touring was equipped with a PDK automatic gearbox, this was maybe less of an issue than in the 911 T, which comes with a manual gearbox… but still.

So altogether, I was blown away by the GT3 Touring. The driving is phenomenal; the steering, the stiff chassis, the immensely powerful 4.0 liter flat six, all add to an almost absurd level of driving pleasure. Really, it’s so good. But it’s also too good, at least to me, for using this as a daily car. I would be way too tempted to put my foot down during pretty much every ride. While I wouldn’t necessarily disqualify a car for an impractical placement of the cup holder, I have to admit that I still long for the 911T to replace my 997, as that to me feels the perfect modern 911 replacement to it.”

Robin: “In one word, sensational! It’s raw, exciting, very fast, and the sound is just incredible. Push it hard, and it will take you along a roller-coaster ride of thrills without setting a foot wrong. I got goosebumps every time you hit the 9,000 revs and shift into the next gear, getting the feeling I am Tom Kristensen as I blast out of a corner. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am fully aware I get nowhere near the limit of what this car can do, but it instils a sense of trust and comfort from the moment you fire it up to the moment you park it on the driveway again. It really is an extremely capable machine that just wants to go, and go, and go some more.

The noise is addictive, the sense of speed is incredible, and things can get illegal very quickly. Yet it’s also perfectly drivable at slow speeds, although you feel the car is less happy trundling along the highway with the cruise control set to the speed limit. It really is a dog on a leash, constantly begging you to let it loose and have some fun. Yes, the ride is harsh, but the chassis vividly communicates everything to you in a way that makes you feel very capable and in control as a driver. The steering is sharp, partially thanks to the rear wheel steering but mostly due to the fact that it’s just a brilliant chassis.

With the removal of that massive “look at me!” rear wing, it becomes more ‘gentlemen racer’ than ‘boy racer’, and I think I would prefer that in the end. It might be a touch slower to 100kph and even more so when hooning it around a race track, but I doubt I would do that on the regular if I were the lucky owner of a 911 GT3 Touring. It still is a very, very fast car and one that begs to be pushed. It does what it is designed to do extremely well, and that is offer pure driving pleasure and put a huge smile on your face at any moment you mash the throttle. Sure, it has its flaws, but what car doesn’t? And to come back to the question I asked in the beginning, does this mean I have found my perfect 911? Well, no… and that’s a verdict I will come back to soon.”

For more information, please visit Porsche.com.

Editorial Note: The information used for and images portrayed in this article are of our own, or sourced from and used with permission of Porsche AG, unless stated otherwise.