Our three finalists for the PCOTY title represent different performance formulas, but each had six forward gears, three pedals, and rear-wheel drive. Coincidence?
Ultimately, the debate was less a sober litigation and more a reflection on what Performance Car of the Year actually means. The Cadillac may be the last V-8 stick-shift sport sedan ever to lay two greasy slabs of rubber down an American blacktop. Isn’t that worth celebrating? Or do you reward the 911 for its race-car soul and life-affirming flat-six? And what about the Toyota 86, that ear-to-ear grin on wheels?
In the end, we were left with a near dead heat. There are no losers in this bunch. But Road & Track doesn’t award participation trophies; there can be only one winner. And what a winner it is.
The Champ: God's own Porsche
The 2022 Porsche 911 GT3 emerges from a spiritual imagination. Its heritage is a misty past. It’s born facing an uncertain future. It is both transcendent and instantaneous. It is the Feast of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit indwells as a car. It is the incarnate faith of the Church of What’s Happening Now. It’s so close to begotten and not made.
It’s barely a 911. The other new 911s have turbos. This GT3 doesn’t. All the other 911s have a strut front suspension. The GT3 uses double wishbones. All-wheel drive? That’s for timid dilettantes. There are faster 911s, but this is the best. Porsche has set the GT3 apart, something for true believers. Drivers. Buyers who would drain their veins to pay in blood if Porsche demanded it.
This is about inspiration and meaning and their substantiation. The GT3 draws on an ancient, deep faith that communion with machinery is in itself worthwhile and ennobling. It validates that faith with its avid character. And it’s as real and tangible as German steel, aluminum, and carbon fiber on a set of French tires.
The GT3 has become a quicker, faster, and more extreme track tool with each generation. But it remains a road car with livable ride quality and excellent outward visibility.
The catechism of GT3 is known and often memorized. The pure heart here is a 4.0-liter, 502-hp flat-six that wails to 9000 rpm. Electrics and modern turbo engines make consistent torque almost instantly, but the GT3 needs to reach 6100 rpm to find its peak. But turbo motors hum and electrics are silent, while the GT3’s engine makes joyous noises rising up unto God.
The central tachometer, Alcantara-covered steering wheel, and manual shifter speak to the GT3’s traditional performance-car priorities.
It’s an engine built for glory with a dry-sump oiling system, a relatively short 81.5-mm stroke, a 13.3:1 compression ratio, and an individual throttle for each cylinder. Blip the accelerator pedal and the first sound is those intake pipes gulping a slug of atmosphere. Then arises the distinct exhaust sound of an opposed six tuned to the baroque luster of Johann Sebastian Bach’s sacred organ music. It’s a car that leaps forward not just across pavement, but in progressive, mathematically precise, artistically structured octaves.
In the 21st century, there’s no avoiding computers. And the GT3 is loaded with devices controlling everything from valve timing to suspension behavior and all the usual nav-this and hear-that entertainment frippery. It’s all incidental. The bedrock of greatness here comes from the time-tested commandments of performance.
The first among those is weight reduction. There’s less sound deadening than in other 911s. No pretend rear seat, no motor to move the rear wing up or down. The trunk lid and front and rear fascias are lightweight plastic, the glass has been thinned to drop 10.4 pounds, the stainless steel exhaust system is practically anorexic, and those center-lock hubs mean 16 fewer fasteners holding the wheels to the car. Lightweight carbon-fiber bucket seats are available, and an optional car- bon roof knocks off a couple more pounds. In total, Porsche claims that this GT3, when equipped with the PDK transmission, weighs 3164 pounds. With the six-speed manual, it’s an even slimmer 3126 pounds. In contrast, the base 911 Carrera—rear drive like the GT3—has a stated curb weight of 3354 pounds. That’s a massive 228-pound difference.
The Porsche 911 GT3 Approaches Motoring Perfection
Despite the SlimFast edict, the GT3 goes big where big is a commandment of its own. Like great tires that are also great big tires. As in 255/35R- 20 front and wicked wide 315/30R-21 rear Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2R rubber. Same size as on the 640-hp, all-wheel-drive 911 Turbo S, but more radically adhesive. Behind them are giant 16.1-inch front and 15.4-inch rear carbon brakes that could have stopped the Romans from entering Judea.
Finally, the greatest commandment is simplicity. Computers are relentlessly logical, but lack imagination—at least in terms of the artistic, sometimes inchoate, often passionate and inexplicable ways that human imagination works. Yes, the GT3 generates numbers, but that’s not its appeal. It’s the sound, the instantaneous bite of those big Michelins, its graceful rotation at apex, its astonishing thrust exiting a curve. It’s so good that it elevates the human spirit without the mediation of ones and zeros. The GT3 isn’t a simulation; it’s science and engineering harnessed to the pursuit of human aspiration. It is so many eternal virtues wrapped up in one Porsche that allows us mortals to reach out beyond our temporary presence.
Yesterday is behind us. Tomorrow remains a mystery. The GT3 is the best of What’s Happening Now. And so, it is Road & Track’s 2022 Performance Car of the Year. Get in good with the Lord and He may bless you with one.
—John Pearley Huffman