Porsche 911 Speedster: Driven
Porsche 911 Speedster: Driven
Curious cocktail, the Speedster. This is the second time Porsche has used its catchiest nameplate to round out a 911 generation; the first being last time around with the 997 variant. That model, a hulking cabriolet with a GTS engine, wasn't particularly great, truth be told. This one though, verifiably the last gasp of the dearly departed 991, and with a GT3 engine and chassis to boot, arrives with greatness virtually plumbed in. Who, after all, wouldn't relish the prospect of an open-air cabin when one of the world's last remaining - and truly sensational - naturally-aspirated engines can be found trilling away over your left shoulder? Porsche knows you would. Porsche knows, in fact, that you might feasibly give your right arm for such a thing. Thus it has conspired to charge an arm-sized sum: this Speedster is 拢211,599 - essentially 拢100k more than the 991 GT3 was at launch. It is such an outrageous amount to pay for an open-top 911 that its maker has not spared the special sauce. For a start, this is the first Speedster to be developed by Porsche Motorsport, the division responsible for every GT-badged variant of the firm's flagship sports car.
Then there's the revelation that the manufacturer has been playing around with the concept since 2013 (just two years after the 991's launch, incredibly) and originally conceived the run-out model with no roof at all. That would likely have satisfied the buyers on America's West Coast - historically the place where most of it buyers live - but would obviously have limited usability anywhere with, you know, weather. Consequently, there is a roof, a fabric one that you'll mostly be putting up and down yourself. Happily it's an easy-peasy, 45-second-ish job and gives you ample opportunity to eyeball the enormous slab of composite its maker has deployed as a weight-saving solution to the double-bubble rear deck requirement. You'll find no bigger single-piece of carbon fibre on any other road-going Porsche, and its fitment is indicative of the effort applied across the board. Re-engineering the 991 with those shortened A pillars was apparently no mean feat.
Ditto the job of fusing a GT3 underbody with what is essentially the back end of a cabriolet. To minimise weight gain over the conventional GT3, carbon fibre features heavily elsewhere in the body, including the front wings and bonnet. Then there's the imperious 4.0-litre flat-six, outfitted with a new lightweight exhaust system so that the engineers might have somewhere to put a brace of Euro 6-qualifying particulate filters. The result, to look at, duly lives up to its Speedster heritage. Granted, the characteristic styling cues aren't for everyone, and there are still some angles where you might conceivably question the visual pay-off of that outsized rear-end. But it looks great from everywhere else (yep, that's a new front splitter) and, frankly, if you're anything like us, there will be too much excited fumbling at the door handle to pay the exterior too much mind. Inside, it's all high-spec 991 - which will be mildly discombobulating if you've driven the 992 because its successor does such a good job of tidying up all the extraneous switchgear.
Still, it's wonderfully well finished, you get analogue dials (which are better, no question) and the drive modes remain pleasingly limited to two-stage dampers, a two-stage exhaust note and a two-stage deactivation of the ESC and traction control. Porsche also gives you the choice of turning the gearbox's auto blip on and off separately, too, as in the six-speed GT3. The manual itself though feels as it did before: brawny, mechanical, accurate and very positive. The thickset clutch pedal follows suit. Bring it up too gingerly or put the throttle down too hesitantly and the transmission won't spare your blushes. This, encouragingly, is not a car for pussyfooting about in. At mediocre speeds, it rather does what it says on the tin, and trundles around the place like a GT3 with the roof removed. Which is, of course, startlingly high praise. Structurally speaking, at least half the Speedster is a convertible, which, by definition, makes it slightly heavier and wobblier than the 991.2 GT3.
