Porsche 718 Boxster GTS

It ain’t cheap, but it is the best Boxster on sale

REMEMBER WHEN THE BOXSTER was an affordable entry point to a brilliant sports car? Me too, but this new GTS costs £61,727, which sounds like a price that should be stuck to the windscreen of a 911 Cabriolet. Then again, today’s cars are expensive because it’s all about the deposit and monthly payment. In Porsche terms this equates to £12k down and £500 a month. For three years. Not cheap either, but have you seen the cost of a pint of beer these days?

Regardless of how you pay for it, Porsche’s 718 Boxster GTS is a gem. It follows the familiar GTS recipe of a little more power and some additional components fitted as standard that would cost you extra to add to an S, such as the PASM chassis. And it’s these that make the GTS the standout car of the Boxster line-up.

The 2.5-litre turbocharged flat-four produces 15bhp more than in the S, taking the total up to 360bhp at 6500rpm, but it still sounds broken despite a noticeable improvement acoustically over earlier 718s we drove. However, it’s what the GTS achieves through the bends that reminds you few, Lotus aside, make a roadster as good as Porsche.

There’s not a single area that stands out, rather there’s multiple. It steers so cleanly and accurately you need a pretty good memory of Porsche’s old hydraulic system to know what you are missing. There is no body roll – not a fraction of a degree – but the GTS doesn’t shock and awe its way down a road, either. The damping action is so super-clean that only monumental imperfections get through to the cabin, the balance is pin-point accurate, and the standard brakes question the need for costly carbon-ceramics.

Ultimately, it still has the feel of a specialist sports car despite being built by a manufacturer that shifts 250,000 cars a year.