Porsche GT2 RS & GT3 Cup Battle for Title of Ultimate 911

By James Derek Sapienza - October 23, 2018

Road or Track: Can’t they both be winners?

Which is better: A road car that can race, or a race car you keep at the track? Well, if you’ve got the means, why not buy both? Porsche Club of America member Steve Dimakos did; he owns a 911 GT2 RS and a 911 GT3 cup car. And yet, he still wants to know. What is the better car? Thanks to PCA and Road America, we now know the answer.

Dimakos is a car guy going back decades. In the 90s, he bought a 964 Turbo, instantly becoming a Porsche fanatic. In the 2000s, he upgraded to a Carrera 4 S, took some driving lessons, and fell in love with the track. Today, he’s smitten with his recently purchased GT2 RS, a 700 horsepower, 3,241-pound road car with racing pretensions. “The 2 RS is a perfect representation of the ultimate car for the reason that it can be a daily driver,” he says. “You can drive it to the office, and you can take it to the race track.”

But, he wants to know how it fares against his GT3 Cup car, Porsche’s lightweight no-nonsense track car. On paper, the 2 RS can at the cup car’s lunch, with a 240 horsepower advantage over the 460-horse racer. But the GT3 is far more flingable, tipping the scales at just about 2,700-pounds. To settle the score, he taps professional driver Bryan Sellers to take both cars out on Road America on the same day to see who can land the best lap time.

Pirelli steps up here too, outfitting the GT2 with Trofeo Rs and the Cup car DH racing tires. No excuses here. Timed laps on the best tires possible with the same pro driver. It’s as even a fight as you’ll get with two very different 911s.

In the end, the purpose-built track car wins out on its home turf. Of the GT2, Sellers says: “you could really feel the power advantage of the GT2 RS as you accelerated out of the corners, and you could feel it as it started to build down the straightaway, and it never really felt like it stopped pulling.” The road car had a best lap time of 2.17.04. That’s impressive, but no match for the Cup car.

The flyweight 911 lapped Road America in a seriously impressive 2.11.98. Using the track as an example, Sellers outlines just how the racer outperforms the road car. “On the Cup car, you’re able to go through [Road America’s Kink] with just a lift, if maybe a slight break,” he says. “But the GT2 RS was a pretty heavy break to be able to make it through the corner. So by the time you got to Canada Corner, turn 12, the GT2 RS hadn’t made up any time on the cup car.” In short, all that power led to more braking, which put it at a definite disadvantage.

Despite the results, Dimakos isn’t mad. On the contrary, he’s elated. “While the GT2 RS maybe came in a second or two slower than I anticipated… I will say that the 2:17 time will probably be faster than most people driving cup cars this weekend,” he says. “That’s pretty impressive… that’s a car that you can now turn around, stop at the grocery store on the way home, then pick up the kids.”

So in an unsurprising conclusion, a pure-bred racer is better on the track than a race-ready road car. But to us, the appeal of tracking a 911 all day, having it beat just about anything else out there, then driving it home is too appealing to ignore. Let’s just call this one a draw.