Porsche 911 GT3 RS (2006) CAR review

Circuit schmircuit. I’ll bet it’s absolutely useless on the road.

We were driving it on the road. In fact we didn’t have the opportunity to drive the RS on the track at all. But we understand your concern. The old GT3, and the GT3 RS in particular, was a pretty uncompromising machine, great fun on track but too harsh to be truly enjoyable away from it. But the new car is a different animal, happy to cruise along at 90mph with seemingly little noise or comfort penalty over a standard 911 Carrera. It’s not all roses though: low speed bumps are still gruesome and the accelerating to pass a car on the motorway fills the cabin with exhaust boom.

But wouldn’t you just have a Turbo? It’s not much more money and is even faster.

They’re very different cars but we’d take the £94,280 GT3 RS over the £97,840 Turbo almost every time. Hard to believe but the Turbo actually feels a little sterile in comparison. Although there’s not much in it when it comes to acceleration figures (3.9sec to 62mph for the Turbo, 4.2sec for the RS and 4.3 for the GT3), the blown car is much stronger in the mid range. But though it requires more effort to extract the RS’s full performance, it’s so much more satisfying winding it right round to the 8400rpm limiter and it feels so much more agile than the Turbo.