2023 Porsche 718 Cayman

ALISTAIR WEAVER: Most films of a Porsche Cayman GT4 RS start like this, a long lens beauty shot, a hard cut to the rev counter spinning to 9,000 RPM, a piece of vegetation fluttering artfully as the car roars past. But we're going to do something a little bit different. Hi, Alistair Weaver here for Edmunds with our full instrumented test of the GT4 RS. We're going to find out whether this 493-horsepower coupe really can do 0 to 60 in just 3.2 seconds, as Porsche claims. We're going to measure the braking. We're going to measure the lateral acceleration. That's grip. And if our kit can handle it, we're even going to measure the noise. Hoo hoo! Then we're going to push it to the limit on our tight and twisty circuit to find out whether this $143,000 plus options Cayman finally has the bite we've always craved. And now, without further ado, let's get on with it. Actually, before we get on with it, please subscribe to the channel, and don't forget the bell. And if you're looking to sell your car, head to edmunds.com/sellmycar for a cash offer. Right, onwards. This is the car we thought Porsche might never build. For years, the marketing types held back the Cayman for fear of undermining the 911. But having sounded the death knell of the gas powered Cayman, they're finally letting the motorsport engineers have their way. Translated into German, it's sod it. What's the harm now? What we have here, then, is a mid-engine Cayman with the flat 6 from a 911 GT3 and a 7-speed flappy paddle gearbox with cogs from a race car. You get 493 horsepower, 9 less than a GT3, thanks to a more challenging exhaust. It starts at just over 150 grand, but a few choice options sees our test car topping out at over 195. We're going to take a closer look in a moment, but let's get on with the action. Here's our testing guru, Kurt Niebuhr with the straight line stuff. Talking of which, better get out of here. KURT NIEBUHR: All right, launch control, 718 Cayman GT4 RS. Really not much to it. PDK Sport. Got the exhaust wide open. Should just be able to left foot, right foot, and then let it rip. And it's going to rip. That's fast. That sounds [BLEEP] rad-- all capital letters. Oh, boy. This is the hardest stopping car I've ever tested. ALISTAIR WEAVER: Now, it's going to take us time to crunch the numbers. And I say that just to rile P1ca550, who may own a McLaren and a Ferrari and live in California, but definitely doesn't like artistic license. Anyway, here's the walk around I promised you. There are two big things that Porsche is trying to achieve aesthetically. One is to reduce the mass, and the second is to improve the aerodynamics. So let's start with the mass saving first. If you go for the Weissach package, you get this exposed carbon fiber hood, but that's not all. This front fender is also carbon reinforced plastic. Magnesium wheels, they're $15,500 and include a wonderful center lock there. Carbon fiber wing mirrors, little carbon fiber triangle here, that's an extra $740, a bargain. More carbon here, more carbon here. Of course, the delicious rear wing. And this rear window now has special weight saving glass that honestly sounds more like plastic. And then inside, you get rather fantastic bucket seats. You get a little fabric door pull in place of a plastic handle and a little bit of net in the door pocket, which removes a bit more plastic. Then, of course, there's the piece de resistance, the stick-on Porsche badge. Gone is the enamel, helping you save a fraction of an ounce. Is it silly? Yes. Is it cool? Absolutely. And frankly, it makes me feel very guilty for last night's massive pizza. What does this actually mean on our scales? The RS weighed in at 3,247 pounds, 32 pounds less than a GT4, and a whopping 341 pounds less than a 911 Carrera 4 GTS, but the GT3 was lighter still, coming in 8 pounds under the RS, despite being much larger. The other part, of course, of the aesthetic transformation is all about air and cooling, which, let's face it, it's two sides of the same coin. Now, let me start with the so-called NACA ducts. Now, indulge me for a moment, because this is fantastic track day banter. NACA stands for National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. It was actually the forerunner to NASA. And what these things do is to improve the cooling without increasing the drag, which is really the Holy Grail. Now, you might wonder what they're actually feeding, but if you open the hood, you can see there's a little hole in here. And what it's doing is channeling air down to the brakes to cool off the stoppers. So that's the first part of it. What else do we have? Well, we have these ducts here, which derive from a 911 GT3 RS. They're designed to reduce the pressure around the front wheels at high speed. If you look down the side of the car, the vent at the bottom is no longer providing air to the engine. It's really just for cooling, and instead the intakes sit around your shoulders. Now, that's a big clue to this car's character, and we'll talk more about that when we're actually off and running. What else? Well, if you're a proper track day warrior, you can adjust the rear wing through several positions using a little Allen key. But if you do that, you also have to adjust the front splitter to balance out the aero. What else? Well, you can tweak the camber. You can tweak the anti-roll bars, and you can tweak the towing, because obviously you know far more than Porsche about how to set these things up. Being a little bit cynical here. As you'd expect, the whole thing sits on RS specific springs and dampers. And on this car in particular, you get Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 R tires, which, as you can see, are basically hand-cut slicks. Super soft compound, very similar, if not identical, to the Porsche Super Cup race tire. They work fantastically well when it's super hot. I mean, it's about a million degrees here in Southern California. Not so good if it's cold or raining, so just bear that in mind. Anyway, that's the exterior. Let's take a peek inside. Inside, it's pretty much standard Cayman fare, but you do get lashings of race tech, a bit of carbon fiber, a gearstick pinched from the 911 GT3, a cute little Racetech steering wheel, and, of course, these fabulous carbon fiber bucket seats. Now, debate rages about how comfortable they are. I think they're superb. My old friend and coworker, Carlos Lago, thinks they're the worst things ever invented, but, you know, he's now at Car and Driver. So what does he know? Miss you, buddy. Beyond that, well, it's proper practical Cayman affair. You get these wonderfully overengineered cup holders that Porsche will never ever build again, presumably because they're vastly expensive. Apple CarPlay, front trunk, rear trunk. The only thing you don't get at the rear is a luggage cover, so keep that gold Rolex in the front. Don't get a luggage cover. Why? Because it's extra weight. Of course, we can't do a Porsche review without playing the comedy options game. Racetech sun visors, $590. Personal favorite, though, this holder for your cell phone-- $530. When I say holder, I don't mean wireless charger. I mean holder. One piece of kit I would have, though, is the nose lift system, which raises the front end. Yes, it's $3,000, but if you're serious about driving this car on the road, you have to have it. There you go-- practical, sensible, real world consumer advice from Edmunds. It's time for the tale of the tapes. Welcome, Kurt. 0 to 60 was? KURT NIEBUHR: 3.5 seconds. ALISTAIR WEAVER: Which is slower than Porsche claims. KURT NIEBUHR: It is, but even with launch control activated, we got a lot of wheelspin. So I mean, we can't do anything about that, but these Cup 2 R tires aren't really built for standing starts. ALISTAIR WEAVER: I did take the liberty of pulling some of our own stats on some of the rival vehicles. Standard GT4, 0 to 63.8 seconds, so it is faster than that, but that, of course, is a manual, not a PDK. But 911 Carrera 4 GTS, tested it only last week, similar money to this, actually faster-- 3 seconds, which is a crazy result. KURT NIEBUHR: Yeah, well, it is all-wheel drive, and that car makes the most of it. ALISTAIR WEAVER: And the way the 911 puts its power down has always been extraordinary. The other one that we had in recently, similar in philosophy, but twice as much money, 400 grand, Lamborghini Huracan STO, also 3 seconds. But interestingly, quarter mile of the Lambo was 10.9 seconds at 125.9. This car got close to that? KURT NIEBUHR: Yeah, it did. I mean, it was 11.7 at like 122.6, which is not shabby at all. But I think, in today's modern world, we kind of expect cars to be slightly faster, but there's still nothing wrong with this. ALISTAIR WEAVER: It's still mighty fast. Let's talk braking-- KURT NIEBUHR: Yes. ALISTAIR WEAVER: --because this has got not only $8,000 worth of carbon ceramic brakes. It's also got super sticky tires. Super-- can't say that-- super sticky tires. KURT NIEBUHR: Yeah, this is-- I believe this is the best number we've ever recorded braking, and 89.5 feet, and it did several of those stops pretty much in succession. ALISTAIR WEAVER: Well, that's extraordinary, because the standard GT4 I got down here is 98. Even the Lamborghini, 98 feet. 911 GTS, 96 feet. That's amazing. And then on the skid part, lateral acceleration, or you might call grip, g-force, this car did? KURT NIEBUHR: 1.18 g. ALISTAIR WEAVER: Which is 0.1-- no, 0.01 of a g less than a Lamborghini, but actually quite a bit better than the Carrera 4 GTS at 1.12, and a chunk better than the standard GT4 at 1.14. So we're a little bit down on the straight line sprinting, but everything else is pretty impressive. KURT NIEBUHR: Yeah, I mean, you have to take into consideration that, if you do compare it to the Huracan STO, like you said, this is less than half the price. ALISTAIR WEAVER: So very fast and absolute bargain. KURT NIEBUHR: Absolutely. ALISTAIR WEAVER: What we did want to call out while we stood here, we talked about these tires being basically hand-cut slicks. You can see how soft they are, but I like how much kind of rubber deposit they've actually picked up. It's basically a race car tire. KURT NIEBUHR: Yeah, it is, but these are tires that you can buy with the car, the Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 Rs. And I think these are the tires that they set the Nurburgring lap record on. ALISTAIR WEAVER: Right, I'm going to give it a little bit more abuse. KURT NIEBUHR: Go for it. ALISTAIR WEAVER: So before I boot it, let's deal with the significant elephant in the room. We run our noise measuring kit in this car pretty much from here, which is kind of ear level. And it measured 102.6 decibels, which is the loudest car by some margin we've ever measured. Now, to give you some sense of how loud that is, OSHA says that anything above 85 decibels can lead ultimately to potential hearing problems. And it's not a linear curve, so 102.6 decibels inside the cabin. It does sound good, though. Let me give you some sense of what we're talking about. So we have the exhaust in Sport, our PDK gearbox also in Sport. I've turned all the stability and traction control systems off, so this is very much reliant on my talent, such as it is. We're in-- going to knock you down to second gear. The straight away opens up, and we're going to give it a punch. 3,000, 4,000. Now, this car has the optional carbon ceramic brakes, which are 8,000 bucks. And of course, as we talked earlier, it has the Pilot Cup Sport 2 R tires, so it has insane amounts of grip and insane amounts of braking potential. Honestly, the way this thing stops-- I've driven, what, thousands of laps of this circuit? And you've got to have a reference point in your head of where the breaking points are. And in this car, you're kind of like, wait for the braking point. Count 1, 2, and then bang on the Ankers. And because it has Porsche torque vectoring as standard, it can actually brake at inside wheel as you start to turn in. What tend to do is brake all the way to the apex, so really kind of heavy trail brake. The way it changes direction-- seriously, is this road legal? I don't think I have ever driven a road car of any description-- not Lamborghinis, not Ferraris, not anything else you can imagine, which is this noisy, this visceral. And although it's a GT3 engine, it's a very different noise. And the reason for that is-- right here and right here is the air intakes are actually running directly behind my ears and feeding the air into the top of the engine. So it's almost like you're wearing the engine as a backpack, and then all this air is being sucked in and dumped into the engine. So in a GT3, what you tend to hear is exhaust. In a GT4 RS, you're really hearing induction, so it has a very different character. It's a lot more kind of immediate. Maybe less cultured, but it's really visceral. If you're hard on the brakes, you can actually feel the ABS start to come in a little bit, but only in a very kind of gentler considered way. Whoa. Oh, this thing is good. It really is. It's cars like this that are the reason why I got into the job in the first place. I've actually got the damper geared in the lesser of the two settings. Now, apparently this was actually set up for the Nurburgring Nordschleife, the famous racetrack in Germany where Porsche does a lot of its development testing. And that track is actually quite bumpy. Our circuit here is much bumpier than it looks. It's actually quite deceptive. It looks very smooth. It's not. So this suspension gives you a little bit more compliance. Even in the lesser of the two damper settings, it's still firm. It still moves around more than you'd expect in, say, a GT3, which has-- it's just that much bigger and has slightly more sophisticated suspension, particularly at the front. This is a lot more immediate. Porsche's engineers talked a lot to us about it being more like a go-kart. They wanted to create that sort of sense of immediacy and connection between the driver and the road, and they've done a fantastic job of that. It's not for the faint hearted. You feel everything. The car moves around. You have to concentrate really hard. It's exhausting to drive really hard, but it's also unbelievably rewarding. Is it more fun than a GT3? I've been asking myself that this afternoon. And honestly, on a circuit like this, when you're on it, when you're on in the mood, it's a lot more-- it's just a lot more intense. If you asked me to write down on a piece of paper what an ultimate sports car could be, then I kind of would have arrived here-- naturally aspirated, super high revving, small, compact, agile, maybe a manual gearbox. That's probably the only thing that would be in my recipe that this car doesn't have, but honestly, this PDK is such a good system. I'm not even bothering with the flappy paddles. I've just got it in PDK Sport, and it's kind of learning the circuit now, and it's sort of doing its thing. Hoo, hoo! This is a $200,000 go-kart with the best part of 500 horsepower. I'm going to show you just how light I can brake. Just feel the ABS starting to kick it, throwing it all the way. It just leaves it off, changes direction. Feed out the power. Oh! Honestly, on a circuit, that's as tight and twisty as this, I can't think of any car that I would drive faster around here than this. We know it's awesome in a straight line. We know it stops incredibly well, but it's through the tight and twisties that it really comes to life. If you care about these things, this car did a lap at the Nurburgring Nordschleife in 7 minutes 4 and 1/2 seconds, which is almost 24 seconds faster than the standard GT4, which is an inordinate amount of time. You get the impression that the engineers really burned the midnight oil for this car. They've only got one shot at this. This is the last GT4 RS. There will not be another, so this is kind of all they've got. And you really get the impression that they were determined to have this car as the last testament to their genius, their brilliance, their ultimate ability, and that they've really thrown everything at it. This is the car that the engineers always wanted to build. I'm going to miss cars like this. Just as impressive is the Cayman's ability to handle the real world. Go easy with the loud pedal, and the GT4 RS is happy to poodle around with something approaching civility. The ride is on the sporting side of firm, of course, and at times, it runs out of compliance, hopping and skipping. But this is still a toy that you could realistically road trip. This is the low grip handling circuit where we famously showed the futility of the Tesla yoke, but its real purpose is to simulate driving on ice so you can explore the dynamic repertoire of the car. And I was reminded that, many years ago, I spoke to Walter Rohrl, the legendary Porsche test driver and former World Rally Champion. He told me that the Cayman was simply sensational in winter testing in the Arctic. So I thought we'd come down here and have a bit of fun. So stability off, everything else on, and here we go. See, the interesting thing is, unlike a 911, a Cayman pivots about its center point, whereas a 911 pivots a little bit further back because, of course, it's rear engine. A little bit of patience here, a little kick of the throttle. It's also where you benefit, of course, from the instantaneous throttle response of a naturally aspirated power plant. Oh, kind of getting the impression that Walter, after the first time, knows what he's on about, because this is fabulous. This is heaven. Kick it out, turn it back in, do the old Scandinavian flick. Easy on the power. Patience, patience, Weaver. Patience. Oh, pendulum, pendulum. Flick it in. Oh, feel like a hero. Let's see if we can complete the turn. Honestly, if you ever get the opportunity to do this, this is so much fun. Flick it back the other way. Great day to be alive. We get to drive lots of cars while the engineers hold that little bit back, maybe to protect another model, and maybe to save something for the future. But this isn't one of those. This is a kitchen sink car. It's all in. Why? Because even Porsche admits that the next generation Cayman will not be gas powered. It'll be a pure EV, so this-- this is as good as it gets. And it is very, very good. With the exception of a couple of race cars, this is the most extreme Porsche I've ever driven. It's a step even beyond the 911 GT3 RS. It really is that visceral, that exciting, that immediate in its response. It really blurs the line between road and race as never before. On a track, it feels utterly superb. And then it manages to combine that with a degree of usable civility on the road is a supreme achievement. A GT3 is easier to live with day to day, but-- and I'm going to say it-- it's less exciting. It really is. Spending close on $200,000 on what is effectively a toy, an indulgence is, of course, a hell of a lot of money. But if you can find a dealer who will sell you one for MSRP or close to it, frankly, you're never likely to lose money on a GT4 RS. Who knows? You might even make money. So if you've got the cash, do it. You won't regret it, and you'll never ever get the chance again. Honestly, this is the car that many of us, including me, thought we'd maybe never see, but I'm certainly glad that we did. If this is the last hurrah, then it's a hell of a send off.