To fully appreciate the 2022 Porsche 911 GT3 RS (992), I'm going to have to sound more like an uninformed moron than usual by going into a philosophical rant for a bit. Oh yeah, this is a long piece.
In recent times, I think the modern supercar has become something less to be driven hard for its superior performance, and more of a status symbol, something more to be worn like clothing, a tool to woo a partner, or simply as a tool to earn a profit by hanging onto a rare and expensive car before selling it for a profit. To appear impressive on the spec sheets and to impress your average buyer for these six–figure toys, the modern supercar just keeps getting more and more powerful, simply because it's the easiest to print on a headline and easiest to understand. Cars getting more powerful might sound like a good thing, but I personally view power as a necessary evil even in a sports car, simply because power cannot increase on its own without other aspects of the car keeping up. To attain more power output, the engine needs to be bigger. It needs to run higher boost pressures. The car will need more radiators and coolants to keep all that cool. The fuel tank needs to be bigger to last the same distances. The tyres need to be wider to put down that power. The springs need to be stiffer to handle all that g. The car needs more aero to keep it stable. That means lowering it further to the ground. That means it won't clear speed humps and scrape on every incline. That means it needs a lift kit for street driving. That means more mass. You get the idea. It's a never ending downward spiral, and hence why I opine that power is a necessary evil that needs to be finely balanced, instead of blindly being heaped on just because modern technology allows for it.
It's all gotten way beyond the point where the power and mass bloat of a typical modern day supercar are becoming frankly irresponsible and completely unwieldy, even for a pretend racing driver with lots of pretending experience on a pretend racetrack. In the ludicrous event that a paying customer actually wants to drive and explore the performance of the high–performance car they bought, these cars almost always have a lot of understeer baked into their suspension and tyre setups, while coming with a harem of electronic nannies that zap away over–zealousness of the drivers, often intervening well before poo hits any of the gazillion radiator fans in a modern, power–obsessed car. But, in so doing, these persistent, omnipresent nannies make these cars a frustrating drive for those that think that they know what they're doing and just want to fully explore and experience their purchase unhindered and at the limit. Even worse, some of the newest cars in the game that I've tried, like the
Giulia GTAm and FL2 Civic Type R, feel like the electronics are there less to help an experienced driver and more to impress someone prancing about at maybe 6 tenths, making them utterly dangerous and unpredictable at the limit. "See how much we can help you turn?
SEE? SEE?! THIS CAR TURNS SO WELL, even though you didn't ask to turn this much! You don't need to feel anything,
juuuust leave all the complicated, life threatening bits to us! Oh, what's that, your years of sim racing experience has made you panic at our intervention and you tried to correct the car that needn't correction? Well, we weren't programmed to handle your stupid pig brain, sod off into the barriers!"
These feisty problems are not at all helped by the fact that tyre technology has not kept up nearly as quickly with the mass and power creep of these modern day rocket–strapped summer villas, meaning that the braking and cornering abilities of these cars, while impressive in a vacuum, have not improved proportionately to the straight line speeds that these cars can hit, resulting in the perception of modern cars not stopping well, as these cars require the driver to stomp on the brakes earlier and earlier before a corner, sometimes before the bend comes into sight, and sometimes even for slight kinks in the road that weren't even
meant to be corners. Of course, this only makes sense thinking about it rationally: higher speeds = longer stopping distances. It's just that, in a video game, where all real world sensations and sensibilities are lost to the absence of our bum g sensors and the upfront fear of a very expensive death in these machines, common sense and the sense of speed can often end up lost in the translation into the digital realm. Under these circumstances unique to a simulator, a driver's mind working faster to match the increased straight line speeds of these cars will also naturally speed up the deceleration times and cornering speeds as well, sort of like putting an onboard video on 1.5x speed, and with that unfortunate flaw in the way the human brain works comes with a subconscious expectation that the braking distances need to shrink and cornering speeds need to raise proportionately to match the increased acceleration performance for a car as well. Otherwise, these modern performance cars just feel clumsy and lethargic at best, and flat out hazardous at worst to drive. I know this isn't a logical thing to purport, but one needs only look at the
recent shebang with the Genesis VGT Time Trial at Monza to find an example of this disconnect.
Add onto this unfortunate reality the fact that we Gran Turismo 7 players are spoiled silly with a swathe of easily attainable and often used racecars in the game—gutted, racing slick shod cars with focused aerodynamics that don't rely on gimmicks, yet can actually deliver on that skewed expectations of speed everywhere—and you have a playerbase that is entirely desensitised to speed they've never felt, and set up to shun road cars—especially modern, high performance monsters. And guess which category of cars tend to have more power than the other in today's climate.
The 992 Porsche 911 GT3 RS however, is the cure to all of those aforementioned sicknesses and nonsense.
Right out of the box, the 992 lives up to its namesake and immediately forces me to resort to a claim that always makes me roll my eyes in a car review: "It drives like a racecar with licence plates". I dislike that cliché because no road car can ever remotely approach the capability and feel of a racecar
(not unless said racecar is literally the Mazda Roadster NR-A), and this gulf in performance between these two very different worlds is something that modern sims like Gran Turismo, Assetto Corsa, and F1 have not been shy to highlight. The 992 GT3 RS in Gran Turismo 7 however, drives and feels very much like an actual GT3 racecar: it goes very much like a GT3, stops using roughly the same brake markers as GT3s, is even more stable and predictable in the bends than
some turds in Gr.3 I've sampled, and shifts almost as quickly as a GT3 as well. This thing feels so close to driving an actual GT3 racecar at 0.9x speed that, despite the fact that I hadn't driven the car prior, everything just fell into place and felt so immediately familiar when behind the wheel; the car just behaves, responds, and puts itself exactly where I would expect and intuit it, so much so that this spoiled gamer and racecar junkie could really start pushing the 992 GT3 RS on a track with just two corners of getting to know the car, as opposed to the several laps I'd usually require to really come to know a road car's quirks, tendencies, and how to compensate for them to drive at their quickest.
A lot of that of course, has to do with the fact that the 992 GT3 RS doesn't chase spec sheet numbers to look impressive—the role of chasing numbers is usually relegated to the turbocharged GT2 models. Free of the usual supercar obligation of "numbers for the sake of it", the GT3 RS is thus allowed to retain the use of a naturally aspirated 4 Litre Flat 6 engine, an excruciating rarity in an era rapidly being stifled by turbocharging and silenced by electrification. Not overly concerned with producing peak torque from idle, this songstress of an engine is capable of a hair–raising 9,000rpm, and is
beautifully progressive throughout its entire rev band without feeling out of breath in the mid range. Unless the aim is to save fuel, there's no on–track situation that will call for even mid range revs, thanks to the lighting quick and impeccably spaced
7–speed PDK gearbox mated to the it. While 517HP (386kW) is meek by modern supercar standards, that's around what a modern day GT3 car produces, and those are hardly slow. The trick is to let the horses carry as little load as possible, and to that end, the carbon draped, aluminium–bodied 992 GT3 RS weighs in at a mere 1,450kg (3,197lbs)—a veritable featherweight by today's standards. And the best part about that figure? It's
Kerb mass, because Porsche doesn't treat its customers and fans like they're stupid.
But of course, anyone reading this in a crash helmet and flame retardant suit must have realised immediately at the mention of that 1,450kg figure that the 992 GT3 RS isn't a bespoke racecar, and further proof of that can be found in the black rubber shoeing the massive 20–21 inch optional Magnesium wheels fitted on our example of the 992 GT3 RS: grooved tyres, Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 in real life, and Sport Medium by default in GT7. The extra mass and lack of grip relative to a GT3 racecar means that the 992 GT3 RS will never set a comparable lap time to an actual GT3 racecar, but the real magic is in how Porsche has finely balanced every aspect of the car, from the power, mass, gearing, and mechanical grip, to give us a car that drives and feels almost exactly like watching a GT3 racecar onboard video at 0.9x speed, making what little mental adjustment we have to do as 1337 gamers on our RGB wheels a minor and entirely subconscious one. In short, it's incredible at "tricking" our brains through a screen into believing that we're in an actual GT3 racecar. The only area where that painstakingly crafted illusion shatters is at high speed, high downforce corners, such as Eau Rouge of Spa and 130R of Suzuka, where, in spite of the very palpable downforce this car generates, the road legal tyres simply don't have it in them to handle those loads at those speeds, resulting in the 992 GT3 RS needing to brake hard to shave off speed to make those corners as opposed to actual GT3 racecars that can take them more or less flat out. The 992 will also need to brake notably earlier than a GT3 racecar going from a high–speed straight into a slow corner as well, so watch out for that.
The real trickery of the 992 GT3 RS however, isn't in the lap times it produces. It isn't in the trademark PDK gearbox, the sophisticated aero, nor the big F–Off wing with DRS capabilities sat atop the engine. Those are all the obvious stuff. Rather, the real magic of the 992 GT3 RS to me is in how the car can stealthily obscure to me things that are clearly there, such as the rear steer system. It's so good at its job that I would have never guessed had been fitted to the car had I not trawled through press releases and technical deep dives to write this! In other words, the electronic gimmicks in this car serve only to help an experienced driver do what they want, and kerb behaviour that they don't want on a track. It sounds so insultingly simple in writing, but I have very rarely liked rear steer system in cars before, because if done badly, they make the rear end of the car snappy, unpredictable, and would just be a plain nuisance. To be able to understand completely how a racing driver thinks, what they would want a car to do, and how they expect a car to react to any given input in any given situation is so incredibly impressive, and to be able to make a car wherein its electronic aids are completely unnoticeable is an electronic, mechanical, and psychological art form, the likes of which only possible with decades of motorsport dominance, in tandem with a marketing department that understands that the GT3 RS is a car aimed at hardcore 911 fans with real track experience, letting the engineers simply cook as they saw fit, and I daresay Porsche is the only car make with bean counters that chill. Porsche's rich motorsports heritage is so clear in the 992 that one could see right past it and not know it was ever there, or see that the car could only have been shaped by a company like Porsche. To top it all off, this nuance of knowing when to stand on top of a hill and shout at the top of their lungs, and knowing when to just shut up, keep their heads down, and simply produce good work, is something that I find is almost completely absent in the supercar world, and proof that Porsche is the only company that gets it, and gets it right.
That all being said, the 992 GT3 RS isn't without flaws, but most of which I find are in the way its implemented into the game, and less to do with the car itself.
VR Showroom Photo Credit: Obelisk
To start small, GT Auto's Clayton really doesn't like the 992. This car gets absolutely zero aero options in GT Auto—it can't even be de–winged—so I hope you like the car's default downforce values, because the car is stuck with them for life. I'm also shocked to find that PD didn't scan the car with its tow hook anchor point covers removed, so installing aftermarket tow hooks will result in Clayton literally DRILLING INTO THE COVERS. Look, I know this is a minor thing, but this is inexcusably stupid and you cannot change my mind; There is NO WAY they scanned a road car exclusively for GT7 five months after the game's release not knowing they needed to scan it with the covers off. A track focused car, at that!
For comparison, here are the tow hooks offered on the 1999 Honda S2000, a car added to Gran Turismo Sport some 31 months before GT7 was even released:
Want to put a licence plate on your road car? That involves putting your own grimy decals on the car, which in turn will wipe all the factory GT3 RS decals from the car. While the community has provided replica decals, user–made content won't ever be depicted with the same fidelity as the cars' original decals, and will always be at risk of being deleted for gosh knows what reason. Want to paint the car? Say goodbye to all the bare carbon bits, too. Want to know what it took to create a super simple My Favourite Carrera tribute car? 3 hours and 109 layers. I know I'm not the most efficient guy with the livery editor, but god damn why is this such a problem in 2024. It throws off my fengshui and makes my chakra boil.
Onto issues that you might actually care about: The most immediate annoyance with the 992 is that its Drag Reduction System (DRS) is manually activated in the game, with no option for automatic deployment. With no rule governing when or how much DRS is allowed to be used, DRS is just a "free speed" button, and it sounds amazing all the way until realisation sets in that you have to hold down an extra button the whole race to run the optimally, necessitating adjusting one's grip on the steering wheel and driving in an awkward fashion akin to learning to live with a new, crippling injury. In the real car, DRS can be set to full auto, and why wouldn't anyone just leave it in full auto? DRS snaps shut on braking zones and when the steering wheel is tilted past a very limited angle, anyway, so it's not like drivers can choose how much stability and understeer they want going into a corner. The speed loss of not using DRS isn't immediately apparent, but it adds up across a lap; just the Kemmel Straight of Spa alone will see a DRS driver shave off something like 0.15 of a second over a non DRS driver.
One could argue that DRS being manually activated make sense in a video game—something that has an inherent goal of being actively interacted with by its user. If that's the case however, then GT7 really doesn't do the 992 GT3 RS justice; the real life 992 GT3 RS comes features adjustability to its front downforce, brake balance, suspension bound and rebound rates, and even the differential behaviour, all of which can be electronically adjusted right from the driver's seat to any individual's style and preferences if they can make any sense of it. Unfortunately, none of that is adjustable by default in GT7, meaning that aftermarket parts need to be bought for a prospective tinkerer who wants to fully explore and get to the most out of their track toy. A 20,000 Cr. Fully Customisable Suspension might not sound like a big deal to someone buying a 340,000 Cr. toy, but the real hit isn't financial, but rather, in the car's PP rating increasing even further from fitting an aftermarket adjustable part. Coming default with adjustable parts will also allow for tweaks to said parts under the often used BoP/Settings Partially Allowed conditions, which temporarily revert a car back to the parts it originally came with, thereby disallowing a 992 GT3 RS to be adjusted to its driver's liking. I like most of my cars with a rear brake bias in GT7's current understeer biased physics, and it's something I'd have loved to try in our weekly lobbies with the 992.
With the 992 GT3 RS driving and behaving very much like a racecar, it will, of course, suffer a lot of the same problems a racecar suffers from as well. The suspension setup is so stiff that the car has no perceptible pitch and roll from the inside and out, which works magic in the dry, sure, but makes the car damn near undrivable in the wet, where there's a very unfortunate chicken and egg issue where the tyres can't grip the pavement well enough to make the body lean in over them, and therefore there's nothing to press the relevant tyres harder into the pavement to dig up more grip. If the skies do turn gloomy, it might necessitate a panic trip to the trackside N2O shop to buy full race spec wet tyres just to keep the 992 on the track. (Thank GOD they don't charge more than Understeer for the same parts!)
The in–game HUD for the 992 is also calibrated super weirdly. Typically, the rev bar shows around the last 2,000rpm of an engine, filling up 500rpm before the rev limit and flashing the filled bar for the last 500rpm to convey to the player, "get ready to upshift!". In the 992, the rev bar instead cuts out that last 500rpm "flash zone", and so the moment it fills up is when the car has hit its 9,000rpm rev limit and bounced off its limiter. It's extremely counterintuitive and forces me to adopt a mindset of "short shift the car", despite me literally redlining it. It's so bloody annoying that, if I didn't need the radar, I'd switch off that lying piece of crap HUD entirely. It's a small issue, sure, but something that doesn't feel right in a car that's all about the raw driving experience be like i riter no god english, or going to a Gordon Ramsay restaurant only to be served overcooked instant noodles. It's boarderline rude coming from supposed specialists in their trade, and just gives off the impression that someone just ran out of time or Fs to give. The 992 deserves better than that. The silver lining to that weird HUD is that the car can be driven pretty much optimally in Automatic shifting. I don't get auto DRS, but I get auto shifting. Yay. Cool, I guess.
And for as much as the 992 GT3 RS bucks modern trends, one area in which it unfortunately can't escape is that it... feels a bit soulless. It's a bit too well put together, a bit too safe. As it is set up by default in GT7, it hardly ever fights back against the driver; it just does everything with a scary efficiency and precision, like a professional butler holding back his personal feelings. Used to be that 911s were famed for being widowmakers, the unreasonably tough final boss fight on New Game+ demanding every morsel of what you've learnt in your journey studying and battling its kind, plus some good luck on top of all that. But now it's... a math exam taken in an air con room with a caring teacher with a bad past who believes in you overseeing the test. It's not a bad thing; far from it. It's just... not what I expect from the 911 name.
And if a modern day 911 drives like this, what hope is there out there for anything else to feel any more exciting?
The 2022 Porsche 911 GT3 RS (992). Drive it if you want to be spoiled for life and hate every other supercar. Or just... you know, hang onto it as the last "pure" ICE 911 to flip it for a massive profit later. To counteract these people, I'm going to put anime girls on my 992 and take it out on dirt and snow courses. Why? Because being able to drive this track toy on dirt and snow is more important than a properly calibrated tach and auto DRS, apparently.
