![]() As one tester so astutely put it, driving a Cayman feels a lot like paddling a canoe. The engine is an unmissable presence so clearly right behind your shoulder, and once the car is moving it rolls around an axis that feels aligned perfectly with your body’s own chest-high centre of mass. You’re couched down extra low at the wheel but feel intimately connected to and at close quarters with the car’s major mechanicals, just as you would want to be, with the steering wheel poking straight out at your sternum. They are seats whose cushion thickness you can even have tailored to your own body shape and preference, if you like. The car’s lightweight bucket seats are snug around the hips and need to be berthed a little carefully, but they are perfectly comfortable over longer distances. ![]() ![]() That’s 14kg heavier than the ‘992’ GT3 PDK we tested in 2021 but still light by modern Porsche GT car standards. Our test car did without many of those optional lightweight touches but still weighed 1444kg fuelled and in running order. The car could be lighter still, of course, allowing for optional carbon-ceramic brakes, magnesium wheels and various deleted interior fittings. Lightweight door panels, lightweight glazing, lightweight ◊ ∆ carbonfibre bucket seats and carbonfibre-composite bodywork all save weight on the car, which comes in at a homologated 1415kg as claimed – some 35kg lighter than an equivalent Cayman GT4 PDK. The axle tracks are also wider and its PASM dampers and passive anti-roll bars have been uprated, the latter being manually adjustable, along with wheel camber and toe angle. The car rides 30mm lower than a regular Cayman, and its coil springs are between 40% and 66% firmer even than those of a GT4 and feature helper springs at each end. It retains MacPherson struts at both ends, although they are fully rose-jointed to the chassis for optimum feedback and wheel control. The GT4 RS is built by those who wondered: ‘Could we put a GT3 engine in a Cayman?’ The ‘should we?’ part, admits Preuninger, didn’t really figure until there was a working prototype and Weissach’s key decision-makers had been convinced, both by its mere existence and by the driving experience, that the car demanded a place in showrooms.įor its axles, the GT4 RS likewise mixes componentry from various GT and RS 911s. A story of development carried out in clandestine fashion so the bean-counters and killjoys couldn’t abort the car before it had a chance to exist and of a vision powered by gut instinct and pure curiosity but backed by the passion of a thoroughly enthusiastic team of engineers. The overhaul that takes this Porsche Cayman deep into track-day-ready supercar territory is the stuff of legend. We are about to document exactly how fast, how loud and how special is one of the most anticipated new Porsches of recent years: the Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 RS. This week, then, the Autocar road test records the benchmark numbers without which the story of Weissach’s latest top-level hero sports car couldn’t be complete.
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