CAYMAN GT4 BESTS GTS – JUST
Ever since I drove the latest Cayman GTS with its 4-litre motor, I have found myself wondering whether it could be the first mainstream Porsche in over 20 years to actually be preferable to a Motorsport department car, those with fabled ‘GT’ letters in their name. Compared to the Cayman GT4 the GTS was only a fraction less powerful, a tenth or so slower and actually a little bit lighter. And to drive it was hard to imagine how it could be materially improved. It’s also £11,000 cheaper.
Add to that my feeling when I drove the GT4 that it lacked a certain sense of occasion until you were driving like someone had just set fire to your underwear and you can see why I was keen to get the two together on the open road. Which, with the help of our friends in Reading, I was able to do a couple of weeks ago.
There isn’t the space here to go into all the relative merits of one versus the other but it was an incredibly close run thing. I liked the fact the GTS is visually a little more discreet than the GT4 and I liked even more that its less extreme tyre specification gave it an all-season dimension that made it far more of a daily driver proposition than the more recreational GT4. In fact for most of the day I spent my time composing my sign off paragraph announcing that, for the first time, the factory had actually outdone its in house tuning division.
But no. The GT4 does have something else: a fluency and a response that, just as a thing to drive, lift it clear of the GTS. Both get better the faster you go, which is as it should be in any Porsche sports car, but angle of the GT4’S rate of improvement is steeper. On a good road it is just that little bit more adept, and on a track I’d imagine considerably more so. In cold, hard terms you could easily argue the GTS remained the better bet because it is cheaper and more usable and therefore the better buy, and I’d not argue with you. But simply as a thing to drive, the GT4 just has the edge. The forthcoming GT4 RS should be something else.