Tompoodie

Does anyone care to speculate whether the base times would have been different with sport chrono features of different throttle mapping, launch control, and not to forget...the active drivetrain mounts?

politeperson

I reckon those Cup 2s are worth 1 second on that track.

por356

This was posted some time ago. I have no idea if these numbers are accurate or not, just sharing ...

CanAutM3

This video just shows how poor of a driver Watson is, the gap between these two cars should be much greater than what he achieved. He just lacks the skills and ***** to extract the most out of the GT3.

And this is not to take anything away from the base 992, it is driving a base C4 on track that convinced me to buy a 992, I was enamoured by how well it drove. But the GT3 is on a completely different level on track.

zachr

Not so sure about that. Extrapolate 2 seconds from a 45 second lap to a 7 minute lap and you get 28 seconds, which isn’t terribly far from the difference in nurburgring times between these two cars. (edit: apparently i should not attempt math anymore)

He’s equally bad in both cars.

CanAutM3

1.8 seconds on a 0:45 min lap extrapolated to 7:00 min is 16.8 seconds. The C2-S is ~26 sec slower than the GT3 on the 'ring, the base C2 would be even slower

Sport Auto found the GT3 to be 7.6 sec faster than the C2-S on the 1:45 min Hockenheim lap, again base C2 would be even slower.

CanAutM3

For comparison, C&D GT3 test results, difference is much more substantial than what CarWOW achieved.

CodyBigdog

Complete data on the GT3 (992) and Carrera (992). This is a good aggregator of data and it looks at results from a number of tracks.

GT3: https://fastestlaps.com/models/porsche-911-gt3-992

Carrera: https://fastestlaps.com/models/porsche-911-carrera-992

The GT3 is a beast. If I were to jump (ie, I thought I could handle the beast) from my 992S, it would be to the GT3…what a great track car.

detansinn

Magazine results are very difficult to reproduce. Journalists will tell you that few owners will go to the levels of abuse that they inflict on these cars. Take them with a grain of salt.

Carwow’s results on that day are their results for that particular day.

For most drivers, the performance between these cars will be basically indistinguishable. Yes, GT3 experience is different (especially, power delivery) — it’s own thing, but the 992 GT3 is bringing last generation’s power train to the table when the Carreras; Turbos, and every other 992 got muscled up. The performance gap between the Base Carrera and a GT3 isn’t what it used to be. Driver skill and tires can cover the spread.

This leads me to an important point— these cars don’t drive themselves. Nurburgring times really have no bearing on reality. When you watch what it takes behind the wheel to record these times, you quickly understand how unlikely it would be for you to get anywhere close to the times the manufacturers and their drivers throw down. We all put way too much emphasis on these numbers.

Spend a track day where you can watch some maniac in Miata, etc lap other drivers in more powerful, more expensive cars, it’s pretty clear that the machine is a relatively small part of the equation.

There’s no such thing as a slow 992. Even the base car throws down “supercar” numbers of just a few years ago. The differences between the variants of the 992 are increasingly incremental vs dramatic steps. That’s not a bad thing. If anything, it just shows how great these cars are. 👍

Vista6019

Loved this comparison. Big praise for the humble base Carrera. I am loving mine.

Vista6019

So true—in the right hands a very capable car on track.

boutrosa

i would love to see how a S or 4s compare to a gt3

Mr Bean

There are other factors that make the extrapolation not as meaningful as one would think. First, this looks like a slow track. This diminishes the GT3 advantage. Second, it looks like bad surface (judging by the acceleration times in the second part of the video). That then becomes more of a race between tire grip than what the engine can deliver.

But I agree that a non professional driver will probably not get the most of either car but will do what feels comfortable. So he will drive both about the same way which will negate the advantage of the GT3. Not saying this is what happened here - have no idea who the driver is.

Tompoodie

Polite person, I searched for some time to find what the difference is between Michelin Sport Cup 2, Sport Cup 2R, Pilot Sport 4S.
I have screenshots on my phone of a test, but I can't remember where this came from (Tire Rack ??). That said these were the results of the same driver testing the tires under the same conditions the same day on a 2.74 km track.
Pilot Sport Cup R 1 minute 8.5 seconds
Pilot Sport Cup 2: 1 minute 10.2 seconds
Pilot Sport 4S: 1 minute 12.1 seconds

IMO Cup 2 tires as factory equipment on a 911 (given that in this test they decreased the lap time by almost 2 seconds) make it seem as if you're getting more value for your money paying a more for faster car then you're actually getting.

I have found this data to be very useful to compare lap times of cars with these three tire types on the same track as an equalizer to see how much of a lap time is attributable to a stickier tire.
Similarly, I use .3 or .4 seconds to equalize a 911 with or without a wing depending on track length.

Tompoodie

Mr. Bean, when I look at lap times, I choose tracks that are relatively slow, that reflect driving in the real world.
Streets of Willow is one of my favorites for that reason, which unfortunately does not have lap times for as many cars as I would like, but can be extrapolated to different cars at other tracks.

My real world driving is the mountains between the Monterey Peninsula and Los Angeles, and hopefully in the near future, autocross.
(I am one of those sissies who does not want to take the risk of driving a street car more than 100 MPH without a full roll cage, fuel cell, onboard automatic fire extinguisher, and Halo seat with HANS device on a track).

For many if not most, the real world includes suboptimal tire surfaces.
Also, the high rpm required to make torque and horsepower with the GT3 also is a frequently debit on the street compared to low RPM turbo torque of the Porsche 9A2 and 9A2 Evo engines.
For all of these reasons, slow tracks with a suboptimal tarmac are exactly what I look for to equalize the playing field for GT/Flacht car vs a Carrera/Zuffenhausen car.

I frequently think back to Pete Stout' s superb first drive report in Valencia, Spain of the 992 where he noted the following:
"It was also interesting to me, in Valencia, due to a big surprise. Just as the 991.1 GT3 RS with a better driver who knew the course couldn't put much if any gap on me in a 991.2 Carrera 7MT with summer tires up a closed hill climb course in Tenerife, I was surprised to find that it wasn't all that hard to keep up with a 991.2 GT3 RS (again driven by a better driver than me) around Valencia. This was strange to me, as I figured the 991.1 RS would've left the 991.2 Carrera 7MT and different zip code had we been on a race track. And yet this time we were on a racetrack, and the 991.2 RS had nothing for the 992 Carrera S. Later that night, an engineer shared that one of the instructors said he had to work his RS pretty hard to stay ahead of a few of the Americans. I don't know which instructor or which Americans, but there were a few quick shoes in my group and this engineer's comments came on his own, not as an answer to something I asked."

With the advent of the 992, it is as if a colossal hand has moved Flacht and Zuffenhausen closer together on the Earth.
Or maybe the somewhat smaller hands of Preuninger, Achleitner, and Walliser. (and VW?)