Porsche v. the World — ‘MotorTrend’ Edition!
Watch as some of your favorite Porsches get put to their paces and squared up against their rivals. Hint: They always win.
When we watch a video where anybody puts a Porsche up against just about, well, any other car, we usually know the Porsche is going to win. MotorTrend hosts Jonny Lieberman and Jethro Bovingdon couldn’t agree more. Lierberman brought up the situation: “You jokingly mentioned Porsches can’t lose a comparison test.” Bovingdon quickly replies to him “it’s never happened” as they share a laugh. We know, the Porsches always seem to have an unfair advantage. We can’t blame them though. They just keep making amazing cars and never seem to slip up.
MotorTrend wanted to prove this fact, so they put Porsche up against some of its heavy weight rivals to see if they could stand a chance. You could take an educated guess now and know that their rivals couldn’t put up a fight if they wanted to. The first battle? The 2018 911 GT3 (PDK) v. the 2018 911 GT3 6-speed manual v. the 2018 Mercedes-AMG GT R. The place? Willow Springs International Raceway, where the cars would go up on the fast-paced Big Willow track. Power is known to be the winning factor here and usually results in success.
The man behind the wheel is Randy Pobst, one of the most successful racing drivers of our generation. Even at a crisp 62 years old, the SCCA Hall of Famer and Porsche factory driver is still setting lap records and winning races. Not to mention, his ability to hop in a car and go fast right away is nearly unbelievable. So when he says “9,000 RPM in a Porsche GT3 is something to put a smile on my face…I’m going to be dreaming about that tonight”, you know you’ve made a special car. After his hot lap around Big Willow, Randy states “Wow, how can I not love this car?”. We definitely understand that.
So what happens when you take a twin-turbo V8 front-engine Mercedes to battle for supremacy? Well, the AMG does have more power. Thus, the crew thought that “the AMG would eat the little Porsche up at Big Willow…Guess what? We were wrong again.” The AMG felt loose around the track and couldn’t get the torque to the ground while the Porsche was sharper than a knife’s edge. All three of the Motortrend hosts would go on to “describing the GT3 as near perfect.”
So you might think, was the manual slower than the Mercedes? Nope. It was also faster than the AMG and within 0.2 of a second of the PDK. This is definitely “proving that unless you get paid to race, there is no absolutely no reason to go with the auto.”
At this point in the video they couldn’t find a competitor for the Porsche, so they put a 911 up against a 911. We then see the Sharkwerks 997 911 GT3 4.1 go up against the Workshop 401 “The Daddy” 1974 911. They call the 997 from Sharkwerks as taking “one of the best driver’s cars ever and gives it more power and crucially, more torque.” The Workshop 401 car is called “a money no object 911 hot rod… the ultimate reminder of the magic the more modern interpretations of a 911 hot rod, have to recapture.” It’s really hard to fight cars like this when they are so good at what they do.
Later in the video, a 2018 718 Cayman goes up against a 2018 Audi TT RS. To no surprise, the Cayman puts the Audi to shame. Bovingdon describes the Cayman as “just so beautifully setup, its so elegant in the way its engineered, the way it goes down the road. It’s incredibly impressive, but also super involving and it just flows like nothing else.” That’s not even one of the best cars the brand makes.
So what is the company’s secret to success? How did they manage to make “the tiny car that never seems to change, but somehow has a million personalities”? Bovingdon states this quite concisely. “Well, just Porsches generally, they’ve just got an attention to detail that no one else has…they have this amazing passion to make the cars better and they don’t compromise.” Consider the fact that a 2019 GT3 RS ran a lap time of 0.13 of a second within that of the 2015 918 Spyder. Yes, that Spyder. If this doesn’t show the brand’s pursuit of perfection, we don’t know what will.