This tuned 992 GT3 is ready to race, if you are

When we see the new Porsche GT3, we generally have a few ideas. ‘Well, that’s a one-and-done car’, for instance, or ‘good grief, is that somehow even better than before?’. But a place our mind never seems to go is ‘bet we could make that better with a few choice mods’. 

Call it a lack of imagination, perhaps, an abundance of ennui that seems to be 2022’s specialty, or simply the idea that a 911 with 500-odd horsepower, face-cleaving cornering forces and the engine sound of the Norse gods themselves is probably enough to be satisfied with. 

Helpfully enough, some enterprising Americans have eschewed the entire concept of contentment – the GT3 you see here is apparently stiffer, lighter and punchier than Porsche’s best efforts, as well as more stable through the corners and better under braking. You know, things it was crying out for. 

The obvious visual cues start and finish with the tig-welded scaffolding in the cabin and the safety harnesses attached to them, which does say quite a bit about the mindset behind this particular GT3. As does the spec sheet, which includes all the right words, numbers and phrases to pique a performance-minded person’s interest – aerospace grade 6061 aluminium this, AP Racing that, equal-length headers the other. Of particular note are parts that we rather assumed didn’t need an upgrade: Bilstein coilovers, for instance, a stainless steel exhaust that’s 9kg lighter, and brakes so large that the standard wheels don’t fit over them.

From where we’re sitting, additions like these make this tuned and tweaked GT3 an even racier version of the GT3. Like a Really Sporty version of the already pretty sporty car, making for a Rather Serious result. Just wondering what you’d call a car like that. 

Given that the GT3 is already a fairly performance-oriented Porsche, destined for track days and parcs fermé, this sort of modification does rather hint at the sort of people who want one – and what sort of aspirations those people might have. If we had to describe it in a single sentence, we’d probably settle on ‘those with an idea to go racing’. 

It’s a rather hand-in-glove fit, then, for the company behind this modified GT3 – Global Motorsports Group. It’s a tuning and engineering firm in California that just happens to be a) rather into racing, and b) headquartered right across the road from Porsche Motorsport North America. Maybe put your other hand in a glove too, just for the sake of analogies. 

So while every GMG-tuned, £186,000 GT3 is another step towards stone-faced helmsmanship, there is the opportunity to go a step further. Or, perhaps more accurately and American...ly, a giant leap: proper racing. 

The upshot of this is, of course, race-oriented parts – like an even lighter, track-only exhaust – but the real pace comes from modifying one particular part: the nut behind the wheel.

Dad jokes old enough to be first written in hieroglyphs aside, it’s a huge part of the process. Put the Stig in a Saxo and he’ll keep up with the slowest member of the Top Gear team (the one writing these words, in case you were curious) in a supercar. So for those with racing aspirations to have a one-stop shop that can tailor and tweak the car for each customer – as well as teach and train them to get the most out of it – is the kind of idea we can get behind. Even if, like the idea to make a GT3 even harder and faster, we’d never have had it ourselves.