I looked out my window that first pre-dawn morning in the Catskills and my fate looked back. It was a sun parked at the edge of the hotel driveway, the sky itself overcast. I double checked our scheduling sheet and realized I would be the one to take it out first thing, frost hanging on the grass in the fields we’d pass, Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 tires stiff like hockey pucks in the cold.
Welcome to the run-up to Performance Car of the Year 2023. This year we’ll be running breakout stories on each of our 10 contenders twice a week, every week until the full all-out comparison goes live the third week of January. Let's get into it.
The way that PCOTY works is you have a day at the track, a day on the road, and another half day on the road principally for photography. The schedule for the track is relatively simple for most of us. There are the people really working – Travis Okulski had to record lap times for all the cars present and Matt Farah was in from California to shoot videos – and then there were the rest of us, there to rub shoulders with Road & Track club members and get our general impressions of the cars on a track. The cars that go to PCOTY are cars that would end up at trackdays anyway; what they’re like on, say, the Monticello Motor Club road course is relevant information. On top of that the track time is instrumental in getting all of our jitters out. Let all the lead-foot writers loose on a closed circuit, free from any fear of speeding tickets, so that nobody wraps a car around a telephone pole on the road section trying to find out what a car is like on the limit. The track comes first, the road stuff comes second.
And the track stuff, again, is mostly grab-as-you-go. Cars line up in the pits, three go out at a time for a warm-up lap, two hot laps, and a cool-down. If you see a car sitting idle and you haven’t driven it, hop in. Go out. Come back and scribble your impressions in the notebook left in the glovebox. Each car gets a notebook, and one writer collates everything together into something resembling a cohesive article for the magazine.
The road section requires a bit more organization. It’s fair, there’s more logistics involved. At the track, when a driver is done with a car, they park it in the pits and someone else hops in. For the road, you can’t just leave a car on the side of the road as you continue on. We’d be littering Lamborghinis across the Catskills.
The road section gets a big spreadsheet, with the cars in alphabetic order and drivers rotating through them in a set order, swapping at predetermined points along our predetermined route. Given the number of cars we had against the number of drivers, at every road stop, two people had to drive our two minivans serving as support and camera cars, and a third and final person rode with somebody else. The whole system wonderfully simple, wonderfully idiot-proof, and still a few times we all set off from a rotation point leaving a car behind with no driver.
Even though the route was set and the driving order was set, you still got some luck-of-the-draw moments. I was very glad to find myself in the Lamborghini Huracan Tecnica when the route took us along a fast, clear, long and open, dry and driveway-less section of road and not the rain-drenched, tight, slippery, guardrail-lined section right before it.
Still, there was no escaping the realities of getting one of the most powerful, track-oriented cars right on the coldest and most treacherous start-of-the-morning portion. A Cayman is a friendly car, I knew. What about one with more horsepower than God, and the implicit implication that you, a Porsche driver, know what you’re doing and can handle a mid-engine sports car with tires wider than a dinner plate?
I fell down into the bucket seat, strapped myself in, and maybe uttered a quiet prayer. I was not going to lose the back end of this thing. I was not going to crash the yellow car with the big wing on the first morning of the first day of road driving. I was not going to cause any incident whatsoever with a car that costs more than I will ever, ever make in a year, at my first time at PCOTY. I would drive with the utmost respect! I would not even look for the 9000-rpm redline, let alone find it!
That all went out the door the moment I started driving the GT4 RS.
KRAAAAAAA the car screamed. HRRAAAAAAAGH it yowled.
I didn’t care if the car was a killer or not. I wanted to run it out as much as I humanly could. I would get caught up in the line of cars and just shift it. I’d shift up and down on the PDK (the shortest gearing Porsche has yet crammed into one of its double-clutches) if only to hear the bark of the engine over and over and over again. The induction noise of the engine – the airbox is in the main cabin, ahead of any firewall – took over me. I melted into that flat six, perverse for a car like this, and melted away. That the car is a kitten to drive, completely easy to handle with as good a ride as you’d expect on roads like this, is a testament to the car itself not to me. Maybe I wasn’t really driving all that hard.
Maybe I simply felt like it, the volume of the engine making me feel like I was doing ungodly speed. Maybe! It wouldn’t surprise me. I know that I stayed well within the limits of traction, never actually sliding. I don’t think I did much to break any speed limit, either, on the fantastically tight and narrow, bumpy roads we crossed that frosty morning.
It’s funny that Porsche now makes this car, a pretty straightforward formula. It’s the GT3 engine in the smaller Cayman platform, the full RS treatment normally reserved for the grander 911 gifted to the lesser sports car. It’s funny because this isn’t some sort of mysterious code that only Porsche could crack. Tuners have been boosting up the power and grip of Caymans and Boxsters for years. Not even fringe characters, either. Ruf has been doing this kind of thing for years.
I always dismissed these kinds of specials. Have you ever driven a basic Cayman? Even a nice Boxster? They’re great cars! They distill what is wonderful about sports cars in general. They are so responsive, so communicative. And they’re more than fast enough on any road you’d care to drive them.
But there was something about the GT4 RS. It could have been the sound alone. All I know is that it took a lot of mental work to step into it, and a whole lot more to pull myself back out. I got out of that car and started writing sonnets, my notebook planted on the back wing like a table.
Road & Track's Deputy Editor who once got a Dakar-winning race truck stuck in a sand dune, and rolled a Baja Bug off an icy New York road, and went flying off Mount Washington in a Nissan 240SX rally car, and...
