Battle of the 911 GT3s: Porsche vs Manthey

If there's one place you can come to understand Porsche’s split personality, it’s here – standing in the paddock at Portimão. Rattling away with their distinct, slightly uneven, cammy lope in the hot sun are two cars that share a badge and little else. Both blue. Both stuffed with the same 4.0-litre naturally aspirated flat six engine. Both 911s. And yet as far apart as two cars can be. This is extremity defined in either direction – the GT3 Touring, subtle and stripped back, versus the Manthey GT3 RS, for all intents and purposes, a Cup car that’s wearing a numberplate.

The Manthey is a car so extreme you wonder if the people who homologated it were drunk, bribed or both. The base 992 GT3 RS was already Porsche’s most outrageous road car. But Manthey – the ’Ring specialist that’s won the 24 hour race there seven times, and Porsche’s newly acquired black ops division of speed – looked at it and decided it wasn’t enough. Two years of development, wind tunnels, many miles of endurance running, and what emerged is a car that bends the boundaries, yet still sits within TÜV legality.

Here was the problem – it had to make the car faster, but wasn’t allowed to touch the engine. Emissions, aero, power were all fixed. And it couldn’t strip any more weight, because the RS had already been pared to the bone. So Manthey went down the creative route. One aerodynamicist, barely in his 20s, sketched carbon shark fins. Others bolted on extra roof strakes, wheelhouse gurneys, aero discs. Radical, daring stuff, the kind of ideas Porsche Motorsport might once have dismissed. In fact, nothing captures the madness better than the front splitter story.

Photography: Mark Riccioni

On racecars, a splitter this long is usually braced with steel ropes. But steel ropes fail pedestrian safety tests. So Manthey invented carbon tubes with a spring built in. Push from one side and the splitter flexes 15mm upwards, soft enough for TÜV approval. Push from the other and it’s stiff enough to bear the aero load. A tiny, obsessive detail. A migraine inducing problem solved with ridiculous ingenuity.

At the other end of the spectrum, the 992.2 Touring is the most usable GT3 ever. It retains a clean 911 silhouette, just with an active rear spoiler hiding in plain sight. Yet beneath the subtle suit is the sharpest, most considered GT3 road car to date – and also the most practical. This is the first GT3 you can spec with rear seats, which sounds like heresy until you imagine a child whooping louder than the engine in the back, and suddenly it makes sense. Even within this model you can diversify as the Leichtbau package pulls weight from every corner – magnesium wheels, a lighter lithium-ion battery, CFRP anti-roll bars – and adds the shortened gear lever from the 911 S/T, but thankfully not its capricious clutch. 

Portimão is the perfect setting. It feels less like a racetrack and more like a topographical prank. Blind crests, plunging drops, rollercoaster gradients that leave your stomach in your shoes. The Touring is less about raw numbers – 3.9secs to 62mph, 194mph flat out – and more about sensation.

The 992.2 adds back some of the mechanical clatter of GT3s of old, but it all remains analogue in the ways that matter. The addictive nat-asp 4.0-litre flat six refuses to bow to the age of turbos and hybrids – 503bhp, revving to 9,000rpm, with you stirring the gears and working for your supper. A good recipe.

Around the lap you use the weight in the rear like a pendulum – trail brake, rotate the car, then stand on the throttle and let it sling you out with rear engine traction. When it works, you feel brilliant. When it doesn’t, there’s no aero safety net to save you. It has the classic 911 characteristics and every upshift is an event, heel and toe downshifts a moment. Unlike a lot of modern cars, driving it you feel like you’re part of a mechanical conversation rather than an algorithm.

A Porsche GT3 in 2025 is not a jack of all trades, but a master of extremes

But if the Touring is sophisticated wine tasting, the Manthey is syringes of Red Bull straight into your eyeballs. It takes the already outrageous 992 GT3 RS and turns every dial further than you thought possible. The Manthey is the only car where you can lean on its race pads and brake at the very bottom of Portimão’s scary dip at the end of the main straight into Turn 1.

Arriving everywhere with more apex speed than anything else, the front bites with such aggression you feel the feedback travel from the wheels, through the wishbones, up your arms and into your brain in real time. The changes of direction through Turns 3 and 4 are surgical, the car carving new lines with absurd agility.

With over 1,000kg of downforce at 177mph (that’s a GMA T.50 parked on the roof) there’s aero grip everywhere. But whenever you can, you press the DRS button, the carbon wing flattens, drag falls away, and suddenly you’ve got another gear of speed before the next corner. It’s not a gimmick. You feel it.

The voodoo of this road car that drives like a Cup racer is that it can simultaneously flatter amateurs as well as indulge pros. In the hands of racing drivers, the Manthey kit is 10 seconds quicker around the Nürburgring. In the hands of fat, fleshy mortals, it can be as many as 30 seconds faster than your best. But as Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben never said, with big aero comes big responsibility.

Especially when you have ‘Gives You Wings’ tattooed underneath your park bench sized spoiler. Turn up to a track day in a 3RS MR and every MX-5 and M3 will come after you. Because if you’ve spent £100k on a go faster kit for your £200k car and you’re not handy, expect to be roasted across WhatsApp groups and Instagram.

There was a time when a GT3 was just... a GT3. Raw, noisy, brilliant – a one size fits all road racer. A little rawer than a Carrera, a little tamer than a Cup car, good enough for the B-road and the track day, without needing a degree in aerodynamics to understand.

But that was then. A Porsche GT3 in 2025 is not a jack of all trades, but a master of extremes. The Touring shows how far you can down the road of usability and purity. The Manthey RS shows how far you can go in the other direction – track performance that barely seems road legal and somehow has a factory warranty.

GT3 is now an ecosystem of excellence and the Manthey is taking things in a whole new, more radical direction. And that should be celebrated. Plus, it’s got a road setting. And numberplates. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?