I’ve never heard of such extreme aero measures on a road car

It’s handbags at dawn down at your local Porsche dealer: demand for the new GT3 RS, due to land here sometime in the first quarter of 2010, is far outstripping supply. If you didn’t get your deposit down very early, it looks like you’ll miss out on a very special car indeed. And there we were thinking that the recession had forever ended the ‘overs’ market in high-performance cars.

It’s an intimidating lump, the RS. Like several of its ancestors, it presents its intentions to other road users in several ways, but the one that dominates the show is the rear wing. It’s not much smaller than the one used on last year’s Cup racing car, and is far, far larger than the wing on the first-generation RS. Being carbonfibre, it’s a little lighter, too.

The aero package on this car is significantly revised over the old car. To balance the effect of that monster rear wing and its 170kg of downward pressure at 300kph, the front splitter has a more pronounced leading edge than the regular GT3’s version. But that balance can be spoilt if you choose to increase the attack angle on the adjustable rear wing. The solution? Simple: Porsche will sell you a set of dive planes (those winglets you often see being smashed from the front corner of a DTM car) to add a little more downforce. Outside of your Radicals and suchlike, I’ve never heard of such extreme aero measures on a normal production car. In fact I’m grinning just sitting here writing about it. Dive planes – on a road car: what excellent indulgence. Or should that be nonsense?

The basic specification of this machine is already well known, but just in case you’ve been asleep these past few months, here’s a brief re-cap. Using the same 3.8-litre version of the motorsport flat-six as the standard GT3, but breathing through a new intake system, a larger plenum and a vast intake flap that produces a ram effect, it produces 444bhp – up 15bhp on the standard car. A titanium exhaust system helps too, and it also trims 6kg from the best possible place it could be removed on a 911 – the arse-end. Torque stays the same, as does the top speed (310kph), but the RS accelerates faster than the GT3 (Porsche claims 0-100kph in 4.0sec; we recorded 4.2 to 100 for the GT3).

It does feel mighty special, even at a standstill. One of Porsche’s main aims with this car was to widen the gap between GT3 and RS, making the former a bit more of an all-rounder and leaving the latter free to become more extreme and pander to the requirements of what has become quite a specialist audience.

So it looks a good deal harder. The rear wheelarches are from the wider C4/C4S, and while the wheels share the same same spoke design as the regular GT3, they’re now 9in wide at the front (the track is 24mm wider). The rear rim is the same width as before (12in), but with a revised offset to allow a 325-section rear tyre. I put it to project boss Andreas Preuninger that these vast tyres were ‘beginning to get a bit silly’. ‘No,’ was his impish response, ‘they’re just getting good.’ Good chap.

Getting that new 245-section front tyre has meant the front ride-height isn’t quite as aggressive as it might have been, but the overall effect of these wide tracks, exaggerated bodywork protrusions and some typically offensive colour schemes is unequivocal.

Wriggle into the standard carbon bucket seat and you might, like me, feel that the back-rest isn’t quite upright enough. Luckily this pre-series production car has the optional carbon buckets (5kg each, including the runners), and the driving position is pretty much bang-on, even if the seat is a bit narrow across the shoulders. Production cars have a natty fabric door-pull, but this old nail has a good old-fashioned handle – given that it doesn’t add any weight, I think I might prefer the metal option.

The motor fires with a touch more aggression than the normal car. As it catches, the exhausts shout a bit louder, but within seconds everything is drowned by the chuntering of the single-mass flywheel, which is 8kg lighter than the GT3’s dual-mass version.

Gear ratios play as great, if not a greater part in the RS’s performance advantage over the GT3 than the increased power output. Run side-by-side in a simple 0-250kph drag-scrap, I don’t think there’d be that much in it, but because the RS has slightly shorter intermediate ratios, it has a much better chance of exiting a corner on a race-track and pulling a vital few tenths. No surprises, then, that it’s just posted a 7min 33sec lap of the Nürburgring – 6sec faster than both the GT3 and the new Turbo.

Whereas the GT3 does feel a little over-geared, the RS’s motor is just a touch more accessible. But we’re talking fractions really, because both cars have far too much poke for it all to be used on the public road.

‘this is the best normally aspirated motor porsche has ever built’

It’s a magical powertrain, this. I just don’t understand it when people guff on about these modern cars having less character than they used to. For noise, thrust, response and plain effectiveness, this is the best normally aspirated motor Porsche has ever built. It’ll dawdle around sub-2000rpm-style and then keep pulling all the way to 8000rpm.

If any aspect of the RS’s road-car credentials worried me, it was the wider front track. It doesn’t matter how much power or downforce is at your disposal if your buxom front Michelins have a dangerous appetite for cambers. Well, I’m surprised to say that the extra tyre and track width doesn’t make the car any more difficult to drive on the road. In fact it might even be a little less sensitive to a pronounced crown than the GT3 with its narrower front tyres. Which is very hard to explain, and also a contributing factor to this car’s surprising useability. I hadn’t expected it to be so docile, so civilised.

The steering is about as good as an assisted system gets, this side of an Evora. Pedal feel is excellent and the gearshift is fast and accurate. Should an RS have some kind of fancy paddle-shifter? Preuninger is adamant that this is a drivers’ car, and so should offer the driver a complete role in its controls. The 35kg penalty was also too much to bear. Anyway, the RS is such a tight experience, so lacking in slack and interference that I think he’s made the correct call. With the Ferrari 458 ditching the ol’ stick and most other manufacturers preferring dual-clutch solutions, these fast Porsches might be the final resting place for the three-pedal arrangement in fast road cars.

Only this isn’t really a road car. It’s a machine optimised for the circuit that Porsche has somehow made useable, and enjoyable, for the road. So we’ll need to try it on a circuit to tell you just how much better those front tyres resist understeer, what effect all that downforce has and whether those gear ratios do shunt it away from any given corner with a little more bite – and we’ll have to wait until January for that opportunity. But what we can say right now is that if you were worried that the RS was too hardcore for road use, you needn’t have been. It’s a thug – but a cleverly domesticated one.