Driving a 997.2 GT3 RS on Track

Since reading the 3.2L Carrera vs 328GTB tests when I was still a single-digit age, I have loved the Porsche 911. Even then it was archaic in many respects, but when it came to the art of simply giving to the driver, the 911 still punched with the best. Others are more exotic, but there is something about the single-mindedness of the 911, and its unique layout, that captured my imagination then, and now. I read every article and watch endless videos of them and, as the years have passed, a desire to own one and learn its rear-engined dynamic has only grown. And culminated in my buying one. The following experience is what pushed me into converting the dream into a reality in 2011.

"Up to 2011 my actual experience of 911s was very limited. I got a spin in my brothers colleagues 964 C4 back as a teenager. And I paxed in a 2.7 S, Whopwops 993 Turbo, RS4Fans 964 RSA, Finers 996 GT3 and Bunks GT3 RS around Mondello over the years. But that has been the sum total of my 911 experience.; I’d never actually driven one, or any Porsche for that matter.

And then, as I was tying my helmet up to jump into the passenger seat of Bunks 911 one Friday @ Mondello, he asks me if I’d like to drive his 997 GT3 RS. As cherry-popping goes, this was up there with a Great Schema monk getting freaky with Jenna Jameson.

I said yes. I won’t go into the internal monologue.

So Bunk jumped out & into the passenger seat, I slid the pilots chair back a smidge, and dropped myself into the cockpit. Belt found, belt buckle found after a bit, clutch checked, mirrors adjusted – scaffold noted in the backround, neutral checked, neutral checked again, bit of banter, neutral checked a third time, Holy $hit this is actually happening, and the key is turned. I watch the needle rise on the central rev counter, so innocuous with its yellow needle on grey backround – with that unmistakable fast-Porsche typeface in the middle.

I trundle down the pit lane, raise the drivers window up, and immediately the car just feels so right. Simple stuff, but the suede wheel with centre strip, matched by the gear knob. The seat hugging me, knuckley change into second, clutch bites solidly, no drivetrain backlash or grumble - it is just so tight, but so flattering for a noobie like me. This is a 409bhp, 4.2sec to 60, 190+mph car; it is one of the definitive performance car/supercars of my generation. It shouldn’t be confirming this in 100m of pitlane, should it? We flash our wristbands, and are waved through onto the track.

The car has grunt alright. The throttle response is right there – instant, linear, relentless. I short-shift on my first lap, yet we still hit speeds into turn 3 or dropping down toward Tarzan that are close to V-Max in the Elise. Other things that quickly came apparent on the out lap were:

Steering feel – light but amazingly chatty. If all modern 911s & Boxsters are like this I am very impressed.

Brakes – I find myself pulling up way too early. They don’t feel over-servo’d or anything and are lovely to modulate, but they just have me stopping way earlier than expected even when just covering the brake.

Pedals – perfect in position and weighting. I was heeling & toeing from the very first turn, without even thinking about it. Instantly they provide the perfect platform to start pedalling from. Everything does actually.

Traffic – I feel like Moses at the red sea. Stuff just moves out of the way.

And so Dunlop is exited, Bunk says ‘engage’ and I do my best impression of Sulu...... 2nd becomes 3rd, then 4th is hooked up, 110mph or so is got under the bridge, and I hit the brakes. They inspire complete confidence, a blip from 4th straight to 2nd is made with revs matching easily, and I turn in. The front end feels really light, but with plenty of grip. The back feels heavier, and kind of deadens the cars response in a way that is tricky to describe. Later laps, and other corners with more pace, show that feeling goes somewhat, but the sense of delicate (front) brutality (rear) doesn’t. As I said, it’s a hard one to describe!!

Pulling down toward Turn 3 now, and that benign rev counter suddenly becomes dominating. I actually can’t remember seeing any other instrumentation from here on in, or even the process of looking up or down – you or either looking out the windscreen, with steering wheel centre-strip in your peripheral vision, or else it’s that rev counter like a fecking Eye Of Sauron - watching that yellow needle bear down on 8,000rpm is like slipping on The Ring at the gates of Mordor or something.

Coming into the faster corners, you become much more aware of the weight in the back. Once you are on the brakes, the steering starts throwing information at you – grip & camber and lateral load up front, but also how that is ebbing and flowing because of the weight at the back. It is an incredible conversation, and for my brief time in it a one way conversation - this car spoke a language that was completely foreign to me. It is hard to resolve that the front is going through a gentle pendulum motion with the centre point a metre behind you, when you know you are going forward and hard under brakes, and you feel from every bit of experience you have had, that that centre point should be a metre ahead of you.

Mix any sort of direction change into that and the feeling is exaggerated. You can instantly feel the rear end shift, and steering weight change accordingly. I wasn’t balls out, but the car tells you all of it at modest enough pace - enough of it to tell me not to go balls out. All the while I am babbling like a goon on just how wonderful the whole thing is.

And so into some more laps. Exiting turn 1 again, I commit some more, feeling the front end, easing the power in, bringing the car in tightly right to set up for turn 2, and the rear steps out. Not in a ‘smear of friendly oversteer’ way either, a proper 150deg of oppo applied a bit too slowly, with face saved by a better-judged bit of PSM (Porsche Stability Management). It surprised me! Maybe it was a bit too much of the 409bhp, maybe it was driving too slowly with not enough heat in the rear gumballs, or maybe I’m just $hit. I’ll leave Bunk make a call on it!

I continued to build the pace steadily, and started to feel the car really move in a rear-engined way. It spooked me, I have to say. Out in Mings F430 (albeit from the passenger side), when he starts to work the car, you can sense and understand all the messages it is saying. They’re familiar, even if it was the first time I’d been in one. Ditto an R8. The GT3 RS is SO different. I found it intimidating. I didn’t find the SC’d Atom intimidating, just mental. But the Porsche was getting the better of me a little. I was trying to understand everything it was saying, but you need time. The front grips beyond what you think it should from the feedback, but you can sense there is understeer there, and you can sense that you are not doing it right, but then when you try to drive from the rear through & out of the bend it all feels a bit .... ragged.

I’ll stress now the raggedness was me, not the car. I endeavoured to figure out how to get the thing balanced, but I’ve never tried to balance a rear-engined car before. Coming down from speed into Tarzan 1 I try a little to do what they say and use the front braking a bit to get the nose to stick, and get the rear dialled in. Unfortunately I get the abs kicking before turn-in, and miss the apex by a car width as a consequence. Feckin’ heure! Sensitive thing when push comes to clumsy shove. Tolerant too though, like a patient german waiter listening to some paddy trying to order a three course meal poorly in his native tongue. I press on.

Re-setting my approach a little back toward ‘slow-in, fast-out’ and it was lovely to feed the power out of the more open and quicker bends, and have that back end do a gentle digging-in motion and then the engine digging in over the last couple of thousand rpm. Epic lump slung out there.

I work the brakes harder this lap coming off the main straight, and they are relentless. This time I decide to pay attention to exiting with a bit of commitment. Yup - PSM allows a good bit of slip alright. Bunk laughs at the cost of 305/35 19”s. So do I. Bunk gets slightly more serious. So do I. I like Bunk.

Turn 3 is taken and again that weight really makes its presence felt at the entry stage as you brake for the tight uphill apex. Ditto 4, and 5, and so on. I don’t think I am nailing it at all. Anything. Bunk reassures me that technically I’m doing nothing wrong, but therein lies the mystery of the 911. You are forever trying to get properly right. It needs time and commitment. Controlled aggression to get that front end nailed, and the back set up right to catapult you out. It develops great rear grip, but you sense there is more to come if you learn the technique.

I do another lap or two, and then cool down. And babble. It is a car with the engine in the wrong place, no doubt. Clarkson is bang-on with his assessment. But he also drives like a mong. And that’s the magic of the 911 – yes it is dynamically compromised, but the result is a car that is so engaging, so communicative, so alive that you don’t care about any of that. You just get immersed in the challenge it presents you as a driver, and bask in the interaction and joy it gives back as you try master it. And it talks to you as a driver so much. It isn’t about the pace per se, it is the man & machine extracting it together as a team, like a pro golfer and his caddy.

A caddy that’d swing a Ping into the back of your ball bag if you mess a putt up though. I would scheiße ze bett trying to pedal this car around the Ring, and I have a whole new respect for its lap time there, and of the endless smacks you see on that circuit on YouTube. I dearly wanted one though; the love for 911s was cemented."

The commentary that followed my original observations was very interesting, promoting some more discussion on the unique drive of the 911 from myself and its owner:

Quote:

Originally Posted by #1 Is it really that different? really? you're sure you're not letting its reputation or your knowledge of the physics of the thing go before you?

On the road, I would imagine not so much. On track when you start going quick, then yes you do really notice the difference in messages. I went into it open-minded - I've read heaps on them, but how it feels when you are starting to get weight and grip working is actually quite unique.

I'm used to a light front on the Elise, but realtively speaking the rear is light too and the front end tends to behave like the front of most cars except it takes much more to get it to understeer, and the rear moves quicker and with larger angles than with a front-engined rwd car, like say my old M3.

The Porsches front actually felt lighter than the Elise - power steering mainly but also because the rear influences its feel so much more, even when not 10/10ths. I'd imagine you could drive it 'normally' on track, bring it up to the point where it'll understeer, the back would have enough in hand to deal with that, and you would be going very quickly indeed with a degree of safety. But trying to work that safety factor out of the front, and use the unique dynamic traits to make the car truly dance, is where it gets ... interesting. And absorbing for years too I'd reckon.

Quote:

Originally Posted by 2 You make it sound very alien - is it that different that you can't drive it on to 80% of it's maximum pace within a session? p.s. is getting the front end hooked up proper just a matter of trailbraking (mindful of rear end and over-rotation / weight shift)?

Bunk was popping in 1:57-2min laps. I'd reckon I was around 2min 10sec or so (Bunk would have a better feel, I was mainly concentrating on the driving), so on that basis I was probably floating around nearer to 85-90% of pace. And it is actually very approachable doing that. While I describe the feedback it is giving in as much detail as I can, it doesn't mean that you or I or others wouldn't jump straight in and pop in low 2mins within a session or two. It is how it goes about doing them that is so different. And how going beyond 95% would require a degree of re-learning - both in interpreting the messages it gives, what they mean, and then learning to edge up to the actual limit (as opposed to the initial understeer limit) and how to maximise the benefits and drawbacks the layout gives. Like any car really, except the messages are unique to the rear engined configuration.

I've read an article -Alan- gave me by Mark Hales on the S1 Elise, and how you need to approach it as though it is a 911 as it is almost rear-engined in weight and balance. From the GT3, I'd have to say there isn't the similarity in feedback I thought there would be - maybe when you start really trailbraking or trying to control a slide with the throttle, or there is momentum oversteer during a long bend .... it is something I do intend exploring when I eventually get the bobs together for the sort of 911 I want.

Quote:

Originally Posted by 3 Re: trailbraking - That was the exact question I asked. I think the answer was... 'Well, kinda but, No'.

Yes, a bit of trailbraking would do it, but it isn't just a matter of doing it. Not for me anyway. Light front, weighty rear, understanding what sort of loading the rear can take and where momentum oversteer kicks in, and what sort of throttle stabilises it without ending up exiting stage left...... it'd take a bit of time and my name on the ownership slip to figure it out

And from it's very generous owner Bunk:

So much of what you have written reminds me of the first time I got the car myself.

I would say to all that despite me saying to Nein!Elf "Ah, give it some fvcking beans will ya!" , he still wasn't totally committed.

And thats where you get the raggedness he describes.

You see, the car's great "weakness" becomes a strength after a while. I came to the RS having driven M3's for 6-7 years. I had a ragged driving style; the M3's were so adjustable and I had given up on lap times etc but I knew how to handle it in extremis; so I'd just plough into any corner at any speed, and know that no matter the slip angle, I'd sort it out somehow later on.

The RS however requires a plan of attack for each and every corner to maximise the slow-in-fast-out nature of it. Now when I say "slow" I don't really mean "slow" as its still fast relative to a lot of cars. But its basically about getting the car hunkered down with the wheels going where you want, and the engine "sitting down" on the back wheels giving you immense traction. Its really hard to describe this, but when you get it right it gives you this incredible feeling that no matter how brutal you are with the throttle, its just going to grip and grip and grip and slingshot you out of the corner.

But this is only achieved with true commitment, and it makes finding it fun because its a double edged sword. Once the car is set with the power full on, theres no backing out (as I nearly found at Copse last year at Silverstone).

And you find the faster you get at this, in a perverse sort of way the smoother it becomes. And its a car that keeps on giving because I don't think you'll ever feel you've mastered it.

@1 yes it is completely different. I was amazed when I jumped into the 360 and 430 the difference in certain corners

@ 2 At the OTD, I was experimenting with Trailbraking a lot more by the way, and just after lunch I hit a purple patch where I ran a couple of sessions that were almost perfect (IMO) before my tires and brakes started to go off. My passenger felt the same. However, that pendulum at the rear means this is not as easy as it sounds. And its very easy to get in bother.