EVO: The Right Stuff - Porsche 911 GT3 RS review
#1
04-08-2011, 10:35 PM
EVO: The Right Stuff - Porsche 911 GT3 RS review
The Right Stuff - Porsche 911 GT3 RS review and video | evo features
A rallying legend, the best road in Europe and the new 911 GT3 RS. The perfect ingredients for an unforgettable drive. Francois Delecour meets Porsche and Chris Harris
Now, I am not the betting sort, but I am willing to wager that the non-commercial traveller enters the Southern French town of Grasse for one of three reasons.
He, or she, may be tracing the footsteps of the mercurial Grenouille, the homicidal perfumier from the pages of Patrik Suskind’s novel Perfume, who wends a murderous route from Paris to his eventual destination, Grasse.
Then again, non-bookish types will almost certainly still visit France’s perfume-capital for similar reasons: there are endless tours and herby houses to explore, and if those visitors manage to leave the place without dropping large sums on something stamped ‘Fragonard’ they will have done well.
The third reason has absolutely nothing to do with scent. The town juts up against a large hill, behind which the scenery grows ever more dramatic through vertiginous descents and snowy peaks. Far away in the distance you catch a glimpse of the foothills of the Alps themselves. There is only space for one road to weave a path northwards through this sub-glacial wasteland. It is called the N85 – the Route Napoleon – and I’ve yet to find anyone who disputes the validity of its unofficial name: the best road in Europe.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRvcobW-LN4
The reason for the visit of the new GT3 RS’s occupants is fairly obvious, or at least it would be to anyone brave enough to poke their noses inside its be-caged innards. Harris (questionable personal hygiene) and Rutter (conservative estimate: 30 Marlboro Gold a day) no more desire a visit to a perfumery than they do a different car to use on the road they seek. The new GT3 RS is a speed machine: a faster, more gnarly interpretation of the already A-grade GT3. It don’t need perfume: it needs N85.
We aim to achieve several things today. First, in the name of research, I intend to blister some Michelins. But we also need to explore the slight irony of Porsche inviting us to drive the new RS down here near Monte Carlo. This is, after all, a track car and here we are nowhere near a circuit but just a few kilometres from the stages of the world’s most famous rally. A fine opportunity to remember the 911’s mostly forgotten but stunning history as a rally car. And to visit a man who lives nearby and who has strong views on the 911’s potential future as a rally car. More on that later.
I’ll allow myself one largely irrelevant observation concerning the RS’s skills as a lowly road-tool: it could do with a smaller turning circle to negotiate the tighter sections of Grasse-central. And the new single-mass flywheel may be 1.8kg lighter than the one used in the last RS – and a whopping 8kg less than the dual-mass item in the regular GT3 – but it does require the driver to dip ‘n’ blip with irritating frequency. Makes the RS sound motorsport-bolshy.
Eventually we find one of the elusive brown signs to the Route Napoleon, but we still have to clear the suburbs, which, in a GT3 RS – flywheel chuntering at you like an angry rattler – seem to go on for ages. Frustration builds as you wait for clear air to arrive because you already know what delights await you and this insane new Porsche. And then, whoof, like a climbing aircraft emerging from thick cloud, you suddenly find yourself on a deserted stretch of road. Not ordinary road, but perfect road. If Carlsberg made road, they’d do it like this. Hello N85.
Does the RS feel any different here to the normal GT3? At first you struggle to glean anything other than minute, incremental gains in terms of noise, thrust and agility, but then the N85 offers up one of its super-technical second- and third-gear sections and the RS reveals some significant advantages over the base car.
It’s the front-end that really comes as a surprise to anyone who understands fast-road 911s. The rear-engine layout offers supreme traction and modern suspension has calmed some of the wayward behaviour, but there is still, even in a Gen 2 997 GT3, the very faintest hesitation as you ask the car to tip into a corner and the mass shifts forwards.
Not in the RS. By adding 22mm to the front track and fitting a wider, 245-section Michelin Pilot Sport Cup, Porsche has come closer than ever before to eradicating this delay. It’s still there of course, and the engineers will need to stick the engine where the rear seats are to be rid of it forever, but as a determined effort to confound the laws of physics, the turn-in phase of the new GT3 RS is a compelling demonstration of engineering skill.
It gets even better once you’re into the turn: those changes to the front axle aren’t huge (geometry tweaks to give enough wheelarch clearance) but front-end grip is astonishing once the tyres have some heat in them.
Then it dawns on you that the car is scooting from those second-gear sections with quite a bit more vim than you remember experiencing in the GT3. The claimed performance difference is negligible, but I wonder if that’s because Porsche wasn’t especially bothered about naked numbers and therefore didn’t go through the hassle of pulling a new set from the RS. After all, this car is about lap-time, not zero-to-sixty. From 4000rpm in second, clipping the limiter, snatching third and then doing the same again, the RS feels startlingly brisk.
Traction borders on the unreal too: you find yourself chasing the throttle earlier and earlier, all the while taking the precaution to ready your grip on the wheel, should the need arise, for a swipe of corrective lock. But it never comes. Zero degrees ambient, soft Cup rubber and it’ll take everything in second gear: all 444bhp and 317lb ft. Then again, only when you’ve seen an un-mounted 325/30 ZR19 sitting in the boot of an MPV do you fully understand how vast those rear tyres really are.
We climb higher and, as with all great roads, the N85 has a rhythm all of its own: fast sections – crazy fast if you have the inclination in this car – are punctuated by slower, more technical passes: negotiating rocky outcrops and all but skimming the red paint from those mirrors.
And it’s here that the Porsche rally theme is hard to ignore. This car feels so right over this terrain: the combination of large-capacity naturally aspirated rump-mounted engine and rear-wheel drive is devastating. And then there’s the noise: why Porsche chooses to fit a Sport button to a vehicle that can be ordered with front dive-planes for added downforce is one of the great unanswered questions. But with it engaged, and the intake and exhaust systems working at full capacity, you can’t help but drop the window and wonder how the hell it passes any kind of drive-by test. You might also wonder how it might sound with even less silencing, perhaps working through shorter gears, maybe even with a dog ’box and a flat shifter…
The 911 did some amazing things up in these hills. In 1965, factory Porsche test driver Herbert Linge slithered a largely standard 911S to fifth overall on the Monte, but that was bettered in 1968 by Vic Elford’s outright victory in a 911T. It’s a point of great sadness to me as a rally fan that Porsche seems almost to actively ignore its heritage in the sport: Björn Waldegard scored back-to-back victories in 1969 and ’70, and even after the factory withdrew, a privateer 3.0RS in the hands of Jean-Pierre Nicolas won the event outright again in 1978. That’s four Monte wins in ten years, at the peak of Lancia’s supposed domination of the sport. Even well-versed modern rally fans have little idea of Porsche’s provenance in this field.
The man who will tear us away from the N85 does though: he understands it and feels it passionately. I could so easily drive the RS to the N85’s buffers up in Grenoble then flip one-eighty and scorch right back to Grasse, but instead we peel south-west to Draguignan to meet someone with intimate knowledge of the Porsche 911 as a stage weapon – ex-WRC jockey François Delecour.
Know what: he might just be the coolest man ever to walk on planet earth. On the back of some idle banter in the office and a few emails to get a mobile number, I phoned François the previous day. We’d had no previous contact, he didn’t know me, though he’d heard of evo, and he couldn’t make out from my message what 911 I was bringing with me. ‘But zat doesn’t matter,’ he said on his voicemail. ‘It will be an honour for me to drive this car, a real honour.’
He arrives at the lay-by on the outskirts of his village in a skuzzy, black Evo VIII wearing slightly apologetic rims, which, on closer inspection, underpin his coolness. They’re heavily pitted Sparcos, and the tyres are full gravel spec. Like all rally drivers, Delecour doesn’t do normal rules of the highway.
‘The roads up in the mountains are amazing at the moment,’ he says. ‘Every night I go up and drive the rally stages. It’s my passion. I love to drive there.’ Unprompted and uninhibited, he gabbles on about the fun he has, accompanied by theatrically mimed steering. Then he pauses, looks at the Porsche, crouches in deference and addresses it the way Henry Sandon does an especially rare pot: ‘This is beautiful. Wow. How much power?’ Ever the pragmatist.
I tell him why we wanted to meet. I explain that his experience of campaigning a GT3 Cup a few years back should have precipitated a new dawn of rear-wheel-drive amazing sounding rally cars, and that I’m gutted it didn’t.
You see, last year François tried to enter a GT3 Cup into both the San Remo and Monte Carlo rallies, but neither event would accept his entry because the 3.6-litre, rear-drive Porsche didn’t fit into any normal category. In the eyes of many fans it was a missed opportunity, because the sport is crying out for the two things that mad Frankie and his Porsche would supply by the container-load: noise and skids.
So I want him to drive this car, to experience just how stunning the latest factory-fresh RS is, and how easily it could be converted into a machine that would reignite in people a passion for bobble-hatting. The yawning chasm between conceptual thought and terror-strewn reality has never been better demonstrated than by the journalist who wanted Delecour – known lunatic – to drive him in a new GT3 RS.
He clearly loves the car: wriggles low into the seat, immediately proclaims the driving position ‘Perfect!’, then removes his brain and drives. We head out of town up a hill, me attempting to hold a large camera, him overtaking anything, anywhere and anyhow. It feels preposterous.
‘Do you live around here?’ I gibber, assuming he doesn’t because otherwise his neighbours would have lynched him by now. ‘Oh yes,’ he replies calmly, somewhere north of 80mph on a narrow, bumpy lane, as yet another Jean-de-Florette type takes evasive action: ‘They all know me!’
He’s passionate about the spectacle of rallying though. ‘Of course you could not win a rally in this car, but with some changes to the chassis, brakes and transmission you come maybe sixth. But the noise of these GT cars is amazing.’
He backs it into a hairpin that leads into the town, slews it onto the lock-stops, then throws a heap of throttle at the slide and corrects it perfectly. ‘In my 996, every corner was like that and people would just shout and say FANTASTIC! At the moment rallying is for young people and that’s why Porsche think it’s not for them, but it’s a big mistake.’ Couldn’t have put it better myself.
The ride goes on, we climb up through a stage of the Rally du Var at what feels like full competition speed, then head back down the hill, François swooning over the powertrain, driving so fast I just giggle and wince. This is dental-record territory. Then again, I don’t feel unsafe, largely because he clearly has vast reserves of car control, something he ably demonstrates on a small roundabout by completing two full circuits – fully sideways.
Afterwards he insists that we’re his guests for the night, but we have to get the car back to the other side of Nice. I’m gutted because François Delecour is an energy source, one of those human beings so brimming with charisma that exciting stuff spontaneously happens around them. We leave him preparing for another covert night-skid operation in his Mitsubishi Evo. Legend.
It’s been a long day, so we trundle back down the partly snowbound A8, a touch miffed that the RS has no radio. That part of the journey will stick with me forever because even now I can’t comprehend how comfortable the RS was: it’s perfectly acceptable at a cruise, the seat is ideal for me and the ride for something so single-minded is exceptional.
Not many people will own this new RS, but those who do can surely rest assured they have a package of unparalleled on-road and on-track brilliance. Now Porsche needs to complete the trilogy: go rallying. Take the stage.
A rallying legend, the best road in Europe and the new 911 GT3 RS. The perfect ingredients for an unforgettable drive. Francois Delecour meets Porsche and Chris Harris
Now, I am not the betting sort, but I am willing to wager that the non-commercial traveller enters the Southern French town of Grasse for one of three reasons.
He, or she, may be tracing the footsteps of the mercurial Grenouille, the homicidal perfumier from the pages of Patrik Suskind’s novel Perfume, who wends a murderous route from Paris to his eventual destination, Grasse.
Then again, non-bookish types will almost certainly still visit France’s perfume-capital for similar reasons: there are endless tours and herby houses to explore, and if those visitors manage to leave the place without dropping large sums on something stamped ‘Fragonard’ they will have done well.
The third reason has absolutely nothing to do with scent. The town juts up against a large hill, behind which the scenery grows ever more dramatic through vertiginous descents and snowy peaks. Far away in the distance you catch a glimpse of the foothills of the Alps themselves. There is only space for one road to weave a path northwards through this sub-glacial wasteland. It is called the N85 – the Route Napoleon – and I’ve yet to find anyone who disputes the validity of its unofficial name: the best road in Europe.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRvcobW-LN4
The reason for the visit of the new GT3 RS’s occupants is fairly obvious, or at least it would be to anyone brave enough to poke their noses inside its be-caged innards. Harris (questionable personal hygiene) and Rutter (conservative estimate: 30 Marlboro Gold a day) no more desire a visit to a perfumery than they do a different car to use on the road they seek. The new GT3 RS is a speed machine: a faster, more gnarly interpretation of the already A-grade GT3. It don’t need perfume: it needs N85.
We aim to achieve several things today. First, in the name of research, I intend to blister some Michelins. But we also need to explore the slight irony of Porsche inviting us to drive the new RS down here near Monte Carlo. This is, after all, a track car and here we are nowhere near a circuit but just a few kilometres from the stages of the world’s most famous rally. A fine opportunity to remember the 911’s mostly forgotten but stunning history as a rally car. And to visit a man who lives nearby and who has strong views on the 911’s potential future as a rally car. More on that later.
I’ll allow myself one largely irrelevant observation concerning the RS’s skills as a lowly road-tool: it could do with a smaller turning circle to negotiate the tighter sections of Grasse-central. And the new single-mass flywheel may be 1.8kg lighter than the one used in the last RS – and a whopping 8kg less than the dual-mass item in the regular GT3 – but it does require the driver to dip ‘n’ blip with irritating frequency. Makes the RS sound motorsport-bolshy.
Eventually we find one of the elusive brown signs to the Route Napoleon, but we still have to clear the suburbs, which, in a GT3 RS – flywheel chuntering at you like an angry rattler – seem to go on for ages. Frustration builds as you wait for clear air to arrive because you already know what delights await you and this insane new Porsche. And then, whoof, like a climbing aircraft emerging from thick cloud, you suddenly find yourself on a deserted stretch of road. Not ordinary road, but perfect road. If Carlsberg made road, they’d do it like this. Hello N85.
Does the RS feel any different here to the normal GT3? At first you struggle to glean anything other than minute, incremental gains in terms of noise, thrust and agility, but then the N85 offers up one of its super-technical second- and third-gear sections and the RS reveals some significant advantages over the base car.
It’s the front-end that really comes as a surprise to anyone who understands fast-road 911s. The rear-engine layout offers supreme traction and modern suspension has calmed some of the wayward behaviour, but there is still, even in a Gen 2 997 GT3, the very faintest hesitation as you ask the car to tip into a corner and the mass shifts forwards.
Not in the RS. By adding 22mm to the front track and fitting a wider, 245-section Michelin Pilot Sport Cup, Porsche has come closer than ever before to eradicating this delay. It’s still there of course, and the engineers will need to stick the engine where the rear seats are to be rid of it forever, but as a determined effort to confound the laws of physics, the turn-in phase of the new GT3 RS is a compelling demonstration of engineering skill.
It gets even better once you’re into the turn: those changes to the front axle aren’t huge (geometry tweaks to give enough wheelarch clearance) but front-end grip is astonishing once the tyres have some heat in them.
Then it dawns on you that the car is scooting from those second-gear sections with quite a bit more vim than you remember experiencing in the GT3. The claimed performance difference is negligible, but I wonder if that’s because Porsche wasn’t especially bothered about naked numbers and therefore didn’t go through the hassle of pulling a new set from the RS. After all, this car is about lap-time, not zero-to-sixty. From 4000rpm in second, clipping the limiter, snatching third and then doing the same again, the RS feels startlingly brisk.
Traction borders on the unreal too: you find yourself chasing the throttle earlier and earlier, all the while taking the precaution to ready your grip on the wheel, should the need arise, for a swipe of corrective lock. But it never comes. Zero degrees ambient, soft Cup rubber and it’ll take everything in second gear: all 444bhp and 317lb ft. Then again, only when you’ve seen an un-mounted 325/30 ZR19 sitting in the boot of an MPV do you fully understand how vast those rear tyres really are.
We climb higher and, as with all great roads, the N85 has a rhythm all of its own: fast sections – crazy fast if you have the inclination in this car – are punctuated by slower, more technical passes: negotiating rocky outcrops and all but skimming the red paint from those mirrors.
And it’s here that the Porsche rally theme is hard to ignore. This car feels so right over this terrain: the combination of large-capacity naturally aspirated rump-mounted engine and rear-wheel drive is devastating. And then there’s the noise: why Porsche chooses to fit a Sport button to a vehicle that can be ordered with front dive-planes for added downforce is one of the great unanswered questions. But with it engaged, and the intake and exhaust systems working at full capacity, you can’t help but drop the window and wonder how the hell it passes any kind of drive-by test. You might also wonder how it might sound with even less silencing, perhaps working through shorter gears, maybe even with a dog ’box and a flat shifter…
The 911 did some amazing things up in these hills. In 1965, factory Porsche test driver Herbert Linge slithered a largely standard 911S to fifth overall on the Monte, but that was bettered in 1968 by Vic Elford’s outright victory in a 911T. It’s a point of great sadness to me as a rally fan that Porsche seems almost to actively ignore its heritage in the sport: Björn Waldegard scored back-to-back victories in 1969 and ’70, and even after the factory withdrew, a privateer 3.0RS in the hands of Jean-Pierre Nicolas won the event outright again in 1978. That’s four Monte wins in ten years, at the peak of Lancia’s supposed domination of the sport. Even well-versed modern rally fans have little idea of Porsche’s provenance in this field.
The man who will tear us away from the N85 does though: he understands it and feels it passionately. I could so easily drive the RS to the N85’s buffers up in Grenoble then flip one-eighty and scorch right back to Grasse, but instead we peel south-west to Draguignan to meet someone with intimate knowledge of the Porsche 911 as a stage weapon – ex-WRC jockey François Delecour.
Know what: he might just be the coolest man ever to walk on planet earth. On the back of some idle banter in the office and a few emails to get a mobile number, I phoned François the previous day. We’d had no previous contact, he didn’t know me, though he’d heard of evo, and he couldn’t make out from my message what 911 I was bringing with me. ‘But zat doesn’t matter,’ he said on his voicemail. ‘It will be an honour for me to drive this car, a real honour.’
He arrives at the lay-by on the outskirts of his village in a skuzzy, black Evo VIII wearing slightly apologetic rims, which, on closer inspection, underpin his coolness. They’re heavily pitted Sparcos, and the tyres are full gravel spec. Like all rally drivers, Delecour doesn’t do normal rules of the highway.
‘The roads up in the mountains are amazing at the moment,’ he says. ‘Every night I go up and drive the rally stages. It’s my passion. I love to drive there.’ Unprompted and uninhibited, he gabbles on about the fun he has, accompanied by theatrically mimed steering. Then he pauses, looks at the Porsche, crouches in deference and addresses it the way Henry Sandon does an especially rare pot: ‘This is beautiful. Wow. How much power?’ Ever the pragmatist.
I tell him why we wanted to meet. I explain that his experience of campaigning a GT3 Cup a few years back should have precipitated a new dawn of rear-wheel-drive amazing sounding rally cars, and that I’m gutted it didn’t.
You see, last year François tried to enter a GT3 Cup into both the San Remo and Monte Carlo rallies, but neither event would accept his entry because the 3.6-litre, rear-drive Porsche didn’t fit into any normal category. In the eyes of many fans it was a missed opportunity, because the sport is crying out for the two things that mad Frankie and his Porsche would supply by the container-load: noise and skids.
So I want him to drive this car, to experience just how stunning the latest factory-fresh RS is, and how easily it could be converted into a machine that would reignite in people a passion for bobble-hatting. The yawning chasm between conceptual thought and terror-strewn reality has never been better demonstrated than by the journalist who wanted Delecour – known lunatic – to drive him in a new GT3 RS.
He clearly loves the car: wriggles low into the seat, immediately proclaims the driving position ‘Perfect!’, then removes his brain and drives. We head out of town up a hill, me attempting to hold a large camera, him overtaking anything, anywhere and anyhow. It feels preposterous.
‘Do you live around here?’ I gibber, assuming he doesn’t because otherwise his neighbours would have lynched him by now. ‘Oh yes,’ he replies calmly, somewhere north of 80mph on a narrow, bumpy lane, as yet another Jean-de-Florette type takes evasive action: ‘They all know me!’
He’s passionate about the spectacle of rallying though. ‘Of course you could not win a rally in this car, but with some changes to the chassis, brakes and transmission you come maybe sixth. But the noise of these GT cars is amazing.’
He backs it into a hairpin that leads into the town, slews it onto the lock-stops, then throws a heap of throttle at the slide and corrects it perfectly. ‘In my 996, every corner was like that and people would just shout and say FANTASTIC! At the moment rallying is for young people and that’s why Porsche think it’s not for them, but it’s a big mistake.’ Couldn’t have put it better myself.
The ride goes on, we climb up through a stage of the Rally du Var at what feels like full competition speed, then head back down the hill, François swooning over the powertrain, driving so fast I just giggle and wince. This is dental-record territory. Then again, I don’t feel unsafe, largely because he clearly has vast reserves of car control, something he ably demonstrates on a small roundabout by completing two full circuits – fully sideways.
Afterwards he insists that we’re his guests for the night, but we have to get the car back to the other side of Nice. I’m gutted because François Delecour is an energy source, one of those human beings so brimming with charisma that exciting stuff spontaneously happens around them. We leave him preparing for another covert night-skid operation in his Mitsubishi Evo. Legend.
It’s been a long day, so we trundle back down the partly snowbound A8, a touch miffed that the RS has no radio. That part of the journey will stick with me forever because even now I can’t comprehend how comfortable the RS was: it’s perfectly acceptable at a cruise, the seat is ideal for me and the ride for something so single-minded is exceptional.
Not many people will own this new RS, but those who do can surely rest assured they have a package of unparalleled on-road and on-track brilliance. Now Porsche needs to complete the trilogy: go rallying. Take the stage.
#6
04-09-2011, 12:11 AM
IIVVX, thanks so much for posting all these evo articles. I've always loved their writing and some of their articles from the past have really stood out as my all time favorites and had me re-reading them over and over again:
1. "Ruf Daddy" featuring a yellow 996 RTurbo MkI
2. "Street Racers" featuring Meaden's writeup of the Stradale v the 996 GT3 mk2 on the Stelvio pass.
3. "Deliverance" - another Meaden article describing a roadtrip delivering a 360 and 550 from maranello to the UK using the Route Napoleon.
I loved all these articles because they went beyond a normal review to a just plain great story. This Chris Harris article from April of last year is also one of those articles, not just a review of the RS but an examination of Porsche's lost link to rallying, and joined the above list of my favorite Evo articles.
Rep!
1. "Ruf Daddy" featuring a yellow 996 RTurbo MkI
2. "Street Racers" featuring Meaden's writeup of the Stradale v the 996 GT3 mk2 on the Stelvio pass.
3. "Deliverance" - another Meaden article describing a roadtrip delivering a 360 and 550 from maranello to the UK using the Route Napoleon.
I loved all these articles because they went beyond a normal review to a just plain great story. This Chris Harris article from April of last year is also one of those articles, not just a review of the RS but an examination of Porsche's lost link to rallying, and joined the above list of my favorite Evo articles.
Rep!
#7
04-09-2011, 07:57 AM
^ you're right, the storytelling is what puts evo head and shoulders above anything else in the genre. some spellbinding stuff over the years, the articles you referred to were fantastic, im happy meaden has returned from his failed journey with bovington.
btw, rep back at you for being an avid reader
btw, rep back at you for being an avid reader
