First Drive Review
I was tired when I got there. Two months of nonstop traveling to press previews and auto shows had caught up with me. I had just left my family and friends once again—on a weekend, no less—to fly nine time zones away to the little town of Dinklage in northern Germany. Why was I there? To spend a few hours in the Porsche GT2, the scariest of all turbocharged 911s, a car I'd only read about: enhanced turbo boxer-six, less mass, rear-wheel drive. Sounded great, if intimidating, especially considering the constant rain outside. I thought of my driver's license, my job, and my intact limbs and wondered which I would be parting with today. I sorta wished for the standard 911 Turbo—the one with all-wheel drive—which is perfectly visceral yet comfortable and savory enough in pretty much every way. How much better—or faster—could this one be? I yawned on the way out to the car.
Well, an indicated 331 kilometers per hour—205 miles per hour—on the autobahn can wake a guy up.
That kind of speed—on the ground, anyway—changes a person. It can shake and elate. It can make a believer out of a skeptic and convince him that the bucket of joy known as the Porsche 911 may indeed have no bottom.
That night, in fact, I awoke just one hour into my night's sleep, unable to turn off what became a looping reel of blurry memories of pure fast, where elements of the world—overpasses, windmills, trees, slow Fiats—sail around me, all stretched and distorted as if caught in some sort of intergalactic warp chute. In spite of a 10-mg Ambien, sleep was futile. This is a hell of a car.
GT2: One Number Away from the GT1
The first 911 GT2 was an air-cooled 993-gen Turbo stripped of several nonessentials, including its then-novel all-wheel-drive system and featuring the same 3.6-liter twin-turbocharged engine pumped to 430 horsepower. Nimble, light, and fast, but reportedly snappy and tricky to drive at the limit, the GT2 was just one step away from the GT1 race car (hence the "GT2" designation) in the 911 hierarchy and was one of the most intense 911s Porsche had ever built for the street. Not surprisingly, it soon became the Darth Vader of the world club-racing scene.
The 996-based GT2 was introduced for 2002, offering 456 horsepower, up from 415 in the 996 Turbo. Some 1300 GT2s were delivered worldwide over four years of production.
Since the 997-gen 911 replaced the 996 two years ago, the GT2 has been on hiatus, giving its engineers—most of whom were pulled from the Porsche motorsports program, a separate entity from the roadgoing Carrera's engineering team—time to develop the 2008 model.
More Power, Less Weight
The "fastest and most powerful 911 to ever see the light of day"? Now, there's a claim, one that we'd just heard two weeks before at the GT2 unveiling at the 2007 Frankfurt auto show. It was there that Porsche also revealed the official power figures for the GT2's 3.6-liter boxer-six: 530 horsepower at 6500 rpm and 505 pound-feet of torque, all of which is available between 2200 and 4500 rpm.
That's 50 horsepower and 55 pound-feet stronger than the standard 911 Turbo. Some of the additional power comes courtesy of slightly modified variable-turbine-geometry turbochargers that together provide 20.3 psi of boost, 5.8 psi more than the Turbo. The rest involves engine-breathing enhancements, including a more efficient expansion-type intake manifold to help cool the intake charge, ram-air ducts in the lower half of the rear spoiler, and functional air extractors behind the rear wheel to ventilate the intercoolers.
True Porschephiles might remember that the 911 Turbo with the optional Sports Chrono package has an "overboost" mode that delivers 505 pound-feet of torque, but the difference here is that although that car's boost is available only in short bursts, the GT2's torque can be conjured up all the time. At a claimed 3.7 seconds, Porsche says the GT2's acceleration bests the manual-equipped Turbo's by just 0.1 second to 62 mph, but perhaps more telling, 99 mph arrives in 7.4 seconds, a full second ahead of the 480-hp Turbo manual and a half-second ahead of the automatic. Push the GT2 all the way, and Porsche claims that a stratospheric 204 mph—329 km/h—is possible, 19 mph higher than the Turbo's limit.
