Porsche 911 GT3 RS Weissach

The GT3 RS is the track-biased 911, developed by the motorsport division at Weissach and sold as the closest thing Porsche offers to a racing car with number plates. This is the 4.0-litre version rated at 520 hp, the final and most highly developed naturally aspirated RS of the 991 generation. The flat-six revs to 9,000 rpm, drives the rear wheels only through a seven-speed PDK, and sits in a body shell borrowed in its width from the 911 Turbo, with a carbon-fibre bonnet, NACA ducts feeding cool air to the front brakes and a magnesium roof panel to take mass out of the highest point of the car.

Rear-axle steering, dynamic engine mounts and a fixed rear wing complete a package aimed at lap time rather than comfort. The specification is unusually literal: almost every part that looks aggressive is doing measurable work.

What the Weissach package changes

The Weissach package is not a power upgrade. It replaces the magnesium roof with a carbon-fibre one, swaps the front and rear anti-roll bars and their coupling rods for carbon-fibre items, and adds further carbon trim inside, with magnesium wheels available as the final step. Every one of those changes removes either unsprung mass, mass high up in the structure, or both, which is worth more to a car already generating high cornering loads than another few horsepower would be. The point of the exercise is measurable: Porsche recorded a Nordschleife lap of 6:56.4 with this generation of GT3 RS, quicker than the Carrera GT supercar that once headed the range.

In the Batman Garage collection the GT3 RS is the naturally aspirated counterpart to the turbocharged 911 parked next to it, the 992 Turbo S Cabriolet. Every production generation — 996 to 992, horsepower, original prices and the 600-unit 4.0 — is in Every Porsche 911 GT3 RS. The same GT department's limited-run road cars are covered in our report on the 911 GT3 Earls Court 51 Edition, the open-top reinterpretation of the concept in the 911 GT3 S/C Cabriolet, and the ancestor of the whole high-revving Porsche idea sits in our legends section as the Carrera GT.