DOUBLE VISION

911 GT3 used to mean one thing - now it stretches from a slippery 'Touring' with a manual box and back seats... to a racecar with numberplates

- ROWAN HORNCASTLE

IF THERE'S ONE PLACE YOU CAN COME TO UNDERSTAND Porsche's split personality, it's here – standing in the paddock at Portimão. Rattling away with their distinct, slightly uneven, cammy lope in the hot sun are two cars that share a badge and little else. Both blue. Both stuffed with the same 4.0-litre naturally aspirated flat six engine. Both 911s. And yet as far apart as two cars can be. This is extremity defined in either direction – the GT3 Touring, subtle and stripped back, versus the Manthey GT3 RS, for all intents and purposes, a Cup car that's wearing a numberplate.

The Manthey is a car so extreme you wonder if the people who homologated it were drunk, bribed or both. The base 992 GT3 RS was already Porsche's most outrageous road car. But Manthey – the 'Ring specialist that's won the 24 hour race there seven times, and Porsche's newly acquired black ops division of speed – looked at it and decided it wasn't enough. Two years of development, wind tunnels, many miles of endurance running, and what emerged is a car that bends the boundaries, yet still sits within TÜV legality.

Here was the problem – it had to make the car faster, but wasn't allowed to touch the engine. Emissions, aero, power were all fixed. And it couldn't strip any more weight, because the RS had already been pared to the bone. So Manthey went down the creative route. One aerodynamicist, barely in his 20s, sketched carbon shark fins. Others bolted on extra roof strakes, wheelhouse gurneys, aero discs. Radical, daring stuff, the kind of ideas Porsche Motorsport might once have dismissed. In fact, nothing captures the madness better than the front splitter story.