Porsche 998 GT3 - Car Magazine Review

Back in our January 2007 issue, CAR Magazine named the then-current 911 GT3 as the best Porsche ever. So you could say its updated successor has quite some act to follow. Priced at £81,914 (up from its predecessor’s £79,540), it goes on UK sale in autumn 2009.

This new Porsche 911 GT3 looks like the old GT3 to me

Yes, it’s another evolutionary crawl from VW Beetle towards supercar for Porsche, but the details are there for us anoraks to relish. The wheels (still 19s wrapped in the familiarly hopeless-in-the-wet Michelin Pilot Sport Cups) are replaced by more fiddly, less substantial looking lightweight items with a race-style centre cap. There are also fresh LED lights, subtly reprofiled bumpers, a new front splitter, and new cooling vents at the top of the front and rear bumpers.
And let’s not forget that distinctive new rear wing...

Indeed, what a whopper! Its end plates, too, give a clue to the fettling that’s gone on beneath the skin – 3.8, they say. So the naturally aspirated flat six has grown from 3.6 to 3.8 litres. That 200cc extra capacity, plus Variocam technology acting on both intake and exhaust cams (it’s similar to BMW’s double VANOS system, where before only the intake cam was automatically tweaked as revs changed) allows power to edge up from 409 to 429bhp, while there’s more torque on tap – up to 317lb ft from the old car’s 289lb ft...Continued