Before you read a word, look at the pictures accompanying this story and answer this question: If the 2023 Porsche 911 GT3 RS carried a sticker price of $1 million or more, how long would you need to pick yourself up after you collapsed to the ground in laughter?
Whatever your estimate, it's likely fair enough on the surface. The 911's enduring, insuperable popularity has resulted in the knock-on effect of Porsche being encouraged to crank out as many derivatives of its 59-year-old sports car as its assembly lines can accommodate—and selling every one of them, mind you. Another year, another month, another week; ho-hum, look out, here comes another 911! People who don't get it understandably hit the snooze button.
If the average 911's sleepy ubiquity today is ironically at least partially a result of its inherent goodness, the 2023 Porsche 911 GT3 RS is the line's bucket of dry ice (no water) to the face. Unlike previous modern RS models, this isn't another example of the GT division's tested-and-true formula of taking the standard 911 GT3 and merely upping its general, measurable capabilities by 5 or 10 or whatever relatively smallish percent and slapping another $25,000 or so onto the sticker. That's not to say the GT division had become lazy or that those cars weren't world class; rather, there's only so much you can do to improve a baseline concept that already represents tip-of-the-spear performance—so near the tip, the standard 992-series 911 GT3 a little more than a year ago claimed MotorTrend's inaugural Performance Vehicle of the Year award.
Throw the concept literally to the wind, however, and you get something unanticipated and significantly more freakishly capable than any production 911 that's preceded it. The 2023 Porsche 911 GT3 RS features an array of upgrades compared to the regular GT3, but the car's aero package tells most of the tale.
Which brings us back to when you finally stopped convulsing over the absurd million-dollar question. The point: Recall, for example, the McLaren Senna's $965,000 MSRP. For that sum, buyers received a polarizing (for its looks and lack of daily usability, anyway) hypercar with a twin-turbo V-8 producing 789 hp and 590 lb-ft of torque, one supernaturally pinned to the ground thanks to 1,764 pounds of aerodynamic downforce at 155 mph in an overall package weighing 3,011 pounds. Similarly, if a bit less extreme, Aston Martin recently told MotorTrend its forthcoming $800,000-plus mid-engine Valhalla will make more than 1,433 pounds of downforce at 150 mph.
Granted, every manufacturer seems maddeningly committed to providing its peak aero figures at different speeds from the next guy, making absolute 1:1 on-paper comparisons tricky. Still, the new GT3 RS? Porsche says it makes 895 pounds at 124 mph—and 1,896 at 177. Read that last figure again. Additional perspective: That's more than twice as much downforce as the previous-gen 991.2-series 911 GT3 RS, and about three times as much as the standard 992 GT3 that claimed our 2022 PVOTY award. More nearly preposterous perspective: Porsche engineers flaunt a graph to illustrate how the road-legal GT3 RS's maximum downforce figures eclipse those of the 992 GT3 Cup race car and even bleed into the lower-level downforce settings used in professional competition on the company's GTE-class 911 RSR Le Mans racers. All this, and the active/movable front-and-rear wing-havin', drag-reduction-system-equipped RS's true base price isn't anywhere close to a million. How does $225,250 sound?
Take a moment here to digest this. It's understandable if for the first time in your life you said, "That's all?!" and legit meant it without a trace of sarcasm while reading about a vehicle costing nearly a quarter-million dollars. And if you were sarcastic, you shouldn't have been. Flipside perspective: Chevrolet's massively impressive new 2023 Corvette Z06 with its optional high-downforce Carbon Aero package makes a substantial 734 pounds at 186 mph, and 362 pounds with its standard aero and optional wicker-bill spoiler extensions installed. The Porsche makes those stout numbers sound pathetic. The Z06's base price is $89,110 less than the RS's; in other words, pound for aerodynamic pound, you usually get what you pay for. In the GT3 RS's case and compared to the previously mentioned hypercars, you now get far more.
For aspiring Adrian Newey-types, here's a quick rundown of the aero package's highlights: According to GT division boss Andreas Preuninger, the development team—which included members of Porsche Motorsport—put the GT3 RS through at least 250 hours of wind-tunnel time. That's the "biggest number we ever had, at least double any past cars," he said. "The race aero engineers said they did so much more work on this than they need to do on the race cars."
That's because active aerodynamics and DRS setups are banned in GT racing, so it was a new endeavor for these folks. In the end, they arrived at several notable solutions, not least of which was replacing the standard 911's triple front radiators with a single, smaller unit. That was nothing new to them, as they employ a similar setup on the 911 RSR and other race cars. But it's a first for a production 911, and the reason for using it here was to make room for the dual active front wings located in the nose that move in concert with the rear wing's large, hydraulically movable plane to maintain a 30-/70-percent front/rear aero balance at practically all times. (Preuninger said the 911's shape and architecture dictate 30/70 as its ideal sweet spot.)
Leave the active DRS system in Dynamic mode, and the car determines when to trim-out its wings to their least-draggy positions, with the parameters for doing so being at least 95 percent throttle, 5,500 rpms, less than 0.9 g of lateral acceleration, and a speed exceeding 62 mph. Drivers can trim the wings manually by pressing the DRS button on the steering wheel, if they recognize they don't need full downforce for specific corners where the automated system will call for it and induce speed-slowing drag.
Obvious bits of aero design, like the twin-nostril hood and its slatted vanes, and the black strakes on the roof don't themselves produce downforce. Instead, they deflect hot air emanating from the radiator and out of the hood, and prevent it from reaching the rear of the car and the engine's inlets. Preuninger said the hot air could otherwise sap up to 15 hp. The large cutouts on and in the front fenders and doors, and the obvious air-manipulating pseudo barge-board pieces located just behind the front and rear tires, reduce air pressure in the wheel wells and expel it in a controlled, efficient manner.
Even the double A-arm ("wishbone" in motorsports parlance) forged-aluminum front suspension pieces are designed to exploit airflow with their teardrop shapes, creating a total of 88 pounds of front downforce on their own. Using suspension arms as aerodynamic elements is common in F1 and Le Mans Prototype racing, but it's rare to see it on a production vehicle, even more so one priced at this level. Engineers spent six months developing and testing these pieces to arrive at the final spec.
While we're on the subject of the front suspension, the pivot point where the lower A-arms' front link attaches to the chassis sub-frame is moved lower, creating a new geometry that better reduces dive under braking. This is a critical item, because dive wreaks havoc on aero balance when you rely on downforce to deliver predictable, consistent chassis behavior. Too much dive can equal too much weight on the front, resulting in a light rear end and an oversteering car. According to Porsche, this design cuts the amount of dive by almost half compared to the standard GT3.
Perhaps counterintuitive at first blush, the RS is about 80 pounds heavier than the standard GT3, but this is due to the addition of the extra go-fast equipment, including wider 911 Turbo-style bodywork, the hydraulically controlled massive rear wing, the active front-wing flaps, wider front and rear track widths, and wider wheels and tires. Much like a race team faced with a new set of regulations intended to slow down cars, the GT division clawed back much of the weight gain by using more carbon-fiber-reinforced-plastic (CFRP, but just think of it as carbon fiber) for pieces such as the doors and front fenders, as well as fitting lighter and thinner glass and a stainless-steel exhaust system.
Armed with this information in normal circumstances, the press corps Porsche invited to the Silverstone Circuit for the first drive of the 2023 911 GT3 RS would've overboiled onsite with enthusiasm, ourselves included. Instead, the media collective was glued to mobile weather apps: The home of the Formula 1 British Grand Prix and its offering of several fast corners would, in dry and warm conditions, be a prime venue for showcasing this 911's cornering ability. But any outdoor activities planned for late September in the U.K. are always a meteorological lottery, and of course we hit the jackpot as sporadic but consequential rain arrived on the day of our drive.
We slid behind the wheel of an Ice Grey Metallic example. This RS carried a couple additional performance upgrades, including carbon-ceramic brakes ($10,110) and lighter forged aluminum wheels (21-inch rear, 20-inch front; $3080). As with all GT division models, an optional Weissach package ($33,520) is available and shaves 33 pounds from the curb weight with the inclusion of things like forged magnesium wheels and exposed CFRP on the roof, rear wing, hood, and sideview mirrors. The cockpit likewise features more carbon and magnetic (for a more satisfying click and more positive feel) shift paddles made from magnesium. Lighter CFRP bits you can't see include the rear-suspension coupling rods, rear-axle shear panel, and front and rear anti-roll bars
Inconsistent conditions—damp here, damper there, nearly dry over yonder—are one of the worst things you can encounter when evaluating a sonic performance car on track, and ambient temperatures hovering in the high 40s to low 50s don't help matters. But contrary to our uncertainty of where the grip maxed out, we still learned plenty even as we couldn't get anywhere near the RS's limits.
There's a modern automotive parable that attempts to express advanced aero in tactile terms, as in "you can feel the downforce." It's rubbish if you take it literally, if you think it means you can feel the car being forced into the road surface and thereby somehow understand where the dynamic limits lie. You can't. It's not nonsense if you have a reasonable seat-of-the-pants dyno, just like the one good drivers have in any manner of car.
Even on the wet Silverstone, we initially could see and feel the downforce benefit most clearly in deceleration zones. Following a seasoned instructor who had more laps of the circuit than we did and who was regardless probably inherently quicker than us as a driver, the GT3 RS absolutely annihilated his standard GT3 on the brakes. We're talking utter carnage. Time and again, it devoured yards' worth of distance from the advantage he held going into a corner.
Likewise, and as expected, in corners where we felt more confident and on exits where we believed there was plenty of grip to allow early power application, it was no sweat for the RS to carry its speed in places as though the entire exercise was rather pedestrian. Meanwhile, we could blatantly see our pace car working far harder to hustle through the bends and still maintain control as its back end danced on the edge of adhesion. In contrast, we only felt the RS's front or rear really slide when we got on the power over the track's wettest sections—and we're confident we could have stayed in it without issue, but we didn't want to be "that guy" who bins it into a barrier.
Making a reasonable extrapolation regarding how this would have gone on a dry circuit, the fight was entirely unfair, the GT3 looking utterly average in comparison. We practically forgot just how amazing the latter is as a track car and how it blew our entire team of testers away last year on the Streets of Willow road course during our PVOTY program.
Speaking of power, the 2023 Porsche 911 GT3 RS boasts a mild bump over the GT3, 518 hp versus 502, while peak torque decreases from 346 to 342. The small horsepower gain is thanks to a few changes to the 4.0-liter naturally aspirated flat-six, mostly its new intake and exhaust camshafts and a more efficient exhaust system. The revised valve timing and new engine mapping keep the intake valves open for longer, delivering improvements to the overall power and torque curves especially in the upper half of the rev range, at the slight expense of the peak torque number.
For astute observers of Porsche's GT cars and racing activities, we asked if it would have been possible to use the 4.2-liter engine found in the new GT3 R race car, but engineers insisted the motorsport-specific flat-six can't meet global emissions standards even in production trim, leaving them with few options for greatly increasing the RS's output. This architecture and block go back several years to the 991.2 GT3; despite various evolutions and these latest improvements, Porsche hinted it would need to design a fresh engine to make big gains. With the way the industry is headed in terms of powertrains, there's no guarantee such a day will ever come.
Whatever the case, the GT3 RS is stout in terms of acceleration; it never seems to fade as it yowls toward its 9,000-rpm rev limiter, but it also never overwhelms you on the power. That's the one characteristic where it loses out to aero-similar million-dollar hypercars like the McLaren. We began to wonder if, bank accounts being equal, we'd miss the extra juice in the long run. And then Jörg Bergmeister was ready to give us a hot lap of the circuit. You know, just to show us what was possible even in tricky conditions.
The former Porsche factory driver, a Le Mans class winner, and owner of multiple sports car championships, is a wonderfully nice man who we've known for years, but on this day, he may as well have looked us in the eye and said, "I'm sorry, my friend, but you suck at driving." That's what two laps riding shotgun with him around Silverstone demonstrated. Corner after corner, we sat in near-silent, fearless amazement as Bergmeister essentially treated the track as if it were bone dry, practically braking at apexes rather than before them, carrying so much speed as the 911 GT3 RS rotated into turns that it felt like the chassis was mounted on a spindle. And then we moonshotted out the other side, each time under more lateral acceleration than this author has ever experienced in 20-plus years in this business, driving and riding in some of the most impressive cars ever built.
Unlike plenty of other experiences, at no point did any of this feel like Bergmeister was tempting fate or that the car was a snappy, unpredictable handful controllable only by a top-flight pro driver. Watching his hands and feet on the wheel and pedals supported this perception. Yet the sheer physicality of the cornering forces and speed is nearly unprecedented in a road-legal series-production car on street tires, and it's entirely unprecedented at this price point. Only afterward did we remember the track was still damp. What this 911 must be capable of in the dry is even more of a mindscrew. Bergmeister agreed.
"You have to get used to it to understand how much grip the aero really gives you, how high the limit is," he said. It's an understatement of the highest order, and because of the wet conditions, we never had a chance to even play with the steering-wheel switches that allow you to change the suspension-damper compression and rebound settings or the differential's lockup behavior under braking and acceleration, two additional racing-derived tools at a driver's disposal to fine-tune the car's dynamic behavior. (Porsche's pros chose the wet Silverstone settings and advised everyone to leave them alone.) Besides simply being cool features to play with, the damper adjustment is also a time saver for track-day drivers who will no longer have to park their car and manually change their adjustable shocks.
Even if the track had been dry, it's unlikely we would've had the mental bandwidth during a whole eight laps (including in and out laps) to fiddle with these tools. It takes enough brain capacity to even begin to understand the limits here, and we need much more time with the car to get to that point. MotorTrend's Performance Vehicle of the Year shootout might be a perfect opportunity, though we'll have to wait until the 2024 edition as the 2023 Porsche 911 GT3 RS doesn't go on sale until this coming spring; we'll get some manner of driving follow-up long before 2024's PVOTY program.
In the meantime, we may need to go so far as pondering a new metric for evaluating cars like this. Sure, the GT3 RS will produce solid figures in our traditional testing, from 0-60 and quarter mile times to braking distances to skidpad g's. But none of those things are what this race-car level of capability is about, and they'll do nothing to accurately express the reality here. As Preuninger told us, "This car, on high-speed corners with a Cup-R-rated street tire, is quicker than a 911 Cup race car on slicks. Not in every corner but in high-speed corners. For a street-legal car this is a serious, serious statement."
He inadvertently inspires a final thought: Unfortunately, the company's first-drive program didn't include any street portion, so we can't comment on how the 2023 Porsche 911 GT3 RS functions as a road car. Preuninger says it's surprisingly livable in terms of ride quality, but we'll have to wait until sometime down the road to confirm that. Either way, there's no reason for anyone to buy this GT3 RS if regular racetrack running isn't part of their plan. That'll be the only reason to ever laugh at someone driving this car—one of the most road-course-capable production models of all time, let alone 911s—at almost any price.