We're not sure any other mid-engined series-production car communicates grips level this well. Confidence? Doled out by the bucketload, and more so when the two-way adjustable dampers are left in their more relaxed – and expressive – setting. The new car’s roadholding is exceptional, but when you exceed those limits it’s the relative lack of steering correction required that takes your breath away. This is probably the one major dynamic improvement over the old car, which simply wasn’t this stable, and when the grip ran out, you needed to act very quickly indeed. The balance has an incredible self-centring feel about it, so even if you overcook it on the way into a bends or change course too abruptly, the car settles almost in an instant, quickly maximising traction and drive. Firstly, this is still a gold-plated five-star chassis with bells on it. On track, the driving experience itself will seem revelatory if you’ve never driven the old GT4 and curiously different if you have. This is a wonderful, uncomplicated place to sit. Maybe the steel roll cage that comes as part of the Clubsport pack hinders over-the-shoulder visibility, but it’s marginal. A touch more reach in the column is needed, but really that’s the only criticism. That wheel itself is pretty sublime, too, hitting a sweetspot for diameter and rim girth and not having even a solitary button, toggle or scrolling dial to detract from its primary role.
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The car’s hip point is supposedly identical to before, but from our car’s optional carbonfibre bucket seats it actually feels lower, and even taller drivers can find a position whereby their eyeline almost skims the centre marker of the Alcantara steering wheel. It’s recognisable from before, which is to say the ergonomics are borderline faultless in a fashion only McLaren currently seems to match. It’s taken way up into third gear.īut first the Cayman GT4’s driving environment. There’s a looping, ducking sequence at the far side of the circuit that feels as though the car’s centre of gravity as been thrown in a tumble dryer, and even the opening right-hander is a tight, big dipper of a bend that flows over an adversely cambered crest. It rained at lunchtime but now it’s dry, which is just as well, because if ever there were a circuit to provoke a car with even a morsel of inherent instability, this is it. That said, the suspension is encouragingly well mannered while trundling through the unevenly surfaced paddock at Knockhill, and if the old GT4 is anything to go by, the new car ought to ride just as many other mid-engined machines do: surprisingly, effortlessly well, particularly at the front axle, where the spring rates can be dialled back.Īlas, for now we’re limited to confines of Knockhill Racing Circuit, although given four in five owners will use their GT4 for track days, this is hardly an inappropriate place to get a first taste. Below 3000rpm, this engine can also shut down a bank of cylinders for better fuel economy. Cleverly, it switches banks after a short while to keep the catalytic converters hot and operational. Porsche can get the system working at 8000rpm but not at 9000rpm, which is why the 4.0-litre engine in the upcoming new GT3 won’t have it, and elsewhere there are low-friction roller cam followers instead of tappets. It gets a forged steel crank, hydraulic valves and Piezo fuel injectors that improve propagation by making three individual – and presumably obscenely rapid – squirts for each stroke of the piston.
The new 9A2 Evo unit is a 4.0-litre flat six that spins to 8000rpm, making 414bhp and 310lb ft along the way – an improvement of 34bhp over the old GT4, although torque remains the same (in fact, it arrives a touch later, at 5000rpm).
But in Zuffenhausen, they correctly decided that wasn’t good enough, and so the new car gets an evolution of the 3.0-litre engine found in the current 911, only with the turbochargers sidelined and the cylinders substantially bored and stroked out.
At one point, Porsche toyed with the idea of equipping the Cayman GT4 with a highly tuned version of the downsized 2.0-litre turbo flat-four found in everywhere else in the Cayman range.
And there’s a different sort of progress in the engine bay: an even better sort.
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