Welcome to an episode of a session, Carissa, and Jay Leno's Garage. The three cars we have today were brought to us by Reliable. They brought them all the way out from the Audrain Auto Museum in Newport, Rhode Island, a museum that is constantly in flux. You see, we do these all the time; the cars just keep changing and changing. So you can go there five, six times a year and it would be different cars each time. So that's fun. So I want to thank them for sending these. This is a problem that has stumped people like myself. I like Porsche. I just don't... I guess I got to bring in Spike's Car Radio. This guy knows every point three. These are all 993s, correct?
Oh, okay. What do we have?
We have three Porsche GT3 RSs.
GT3 RSs, and they come from two different generations of 911s.
Now, if you're following at home, get out your pencils and your graph paper. So, they're Porsche GT3 RSs.
We have a 2008, a 2011, and a 2016,
which are, as known to the connoisseurs, a 997.1,
Now, you would think that these numbers would go in sequence. However, the 991 is newer than the 997s.
Yeah, and being dyslexic, they go all over the place. So I have no idea what you're talking about. But I like the cars and they're fascinating. I always wondered what this such minutia difference between these is, isn't it? I mean, these are all the performance variants, correct?
These are all the performance variants. Actually, again, even in Porsche 911s, there are two performance variants: the GT2s and the GT3s.
The GT2s are turbos. The GT3s are naturally aspirated.
These are actually homologation cars.
GT3s are the race cars. They raced in Porsche Cup, and they, of course, now in FIA GT3 racing. And so every manufacturer has to build a certain number of cars for the street in order to homologate them for racing.
And that's never a problem for Porsche, obviously. These things fly off the shelves. People just go crazy for them, don't they?
Yes, and it's very interesting, too, because we talk a lot about limited production cars. Porsche is not a small manufacturer. Porsche is a mass, mass manufacturer. They sell hundreds of thousands of cars a year. And this is the very tip of the Porsche iceberg, the icing on the Porsche cake, the decoration on the top. Cars like this that they build in very small numbers compared to the number of Cayennes and Macans.
What I mean, I mean, the actual 911s they build are not enough to sustain the business.
You know, so I remember that was sort of the big thing. They're expensive and no deals, but you know, it was funny, drive around LA and New York, you see Porsches everywhere. You go in the middle of the country and it's few and far between.
Well, you see more Porsches in the middle of the country today thanks to the SUVs.
Right. Well, well, I mean, I'm talking 911s.
Yeah, the 911s. The 911, it's a very interesting model. It's sort of similar to Rolex watches. Rolex is a luxury watch brand, but Rolex makes thousands and thousands of watches, tens of thousands of watches in thousands. And so it's very interesting that Porsche has been able to maintain the brand mystique when actually being a mass-market manufacturer. They're also the type of car which become much more in the public eye, both because of racing and also because of collector enthusiasts.
Because these are track day cars. These are not the 911s that you buy to commute right every day in.
Well, you could, provided you don't ever need to go grocery shopping, because they have no trunk space. They don't have rear seats. So all the practical things about a 911 that make them really useful have been removed surgically from these guys.
But I like it because you can always identify one. They stuck with basically the same body style, just improved it a little more and a little more. Each time it's that much more of an improvement, it's another tenth of a second off the time, it's another... You know, that's what I find fascinating. They don't feel the need to come up with a whole new look or a whole new model, you know, every year.
Well, the new look part of it is something that I find very interesting. You know the old saying about if you put a lobster in a pot of cold water and turn it on, they don't notice that they're boiling.
You can look at one of these cars, like that 2016 car, and look at a 1964 911, and tell, well, yes, this is a 911. However, you park them side by side and they have nothing in common. There's a wonderful photograph that I saw not too long ago showing the rear wheel of a '67 911S and the rear wheel of a GT3, and one looked like a bicycle tire,
and the other one looked like a tire from a fire truck.
And that they have been able to scale up this car in a way that's really quite clever. Because again, if you just saw the photograph, you think, oh, this car is the same size as the 1964 911, where it is so much wider, it is so much longer. It's a very interesting thing because it is taking that mental step of making that connection in a way that is quite amazing.
But I like the lobster analogy. You put it in and it doesn't know it. You know Gary Larson, he does The Far Side? He has one of my favorite cartoons. A mama bear and a baby bear sitting there, and the father bear is ripping the arms off a hunter. And the mother says to the baby, you know, humans don't feel it when you take their arm off quickly like that. It's just... It's the same thing. Like you said, you don't know... See, they don't know they're boiling. Oh, that's fine. You're dropping a skull at you. It just makes me laugh. It just makes me laugh.
These cars are designed to be driven, and I will take this one moment to stand a little bit on my soapbox.
You've driven these cars.
Right.
I've driven these cars. They are remarkably capable cars. These cars deserve to be driven. And more's the pity that they aren't driven more often, but they have to be driven on a track. That's really where they come alive.
And if you own one of these cars and you take it to the track once a year, you're not going to get a heck of a lot out of them. And it's very interesting when you think about how the market looks at these cars because of their particular characteristics. But getting there, let's have a brief discussion about the differences in these cars and how they've developed over time. We talked about incremental development. So, let's start with our 2008.
You know, it's funny you say I don't take any of mine to the track because I just don't feel the need to break my cars. You know, I enjoy driving them. Like to me, you have everything a race car would have and you're on the street, you're not getting anywhere near its limit, but there's a certain enjoyment in using this every day. And I couldn't imagine not driving this every day if I owned it, or quite often.
Well, let's think about what it is that you own, because I often tell people, and I could be completely wrong, which would be the first time in history, that one of the things that sets you apart is the fact that you don't have race cars because you're not a racer. Everything that you buy you want to drive or ride. Therefore, you don't have race cars because you're not a racer. So, I don't think there are many cars in your extensive collection that are really cars which are unstreetable. So, the question about these cars, yes, they can be driven on the street. Obviously, that is their point. They are homologation specials and they're designed to be driven on the street. They don't give, for me, the kind of level of satisfaction in driving because they really want to be pushed a lot more to really be satisfying,
Well, it's funny you say hard.
because I think if I lived back east, that would certainly be the case. Roads are slippery, it rains a lot more, leaves in the... you know,
when you live in California and it's a beautiful day every day, and although we have the worst traffic in the world, you just go five miles that way up to Angeles Crest, you don't see another car. It's like you're in Sicily, you have these amazing roads, and that's where people really get a chance to drive these cars and use them.
Which is my other point, and I have to be very careful, because again, I will put the disclaimer inside that these are amazing cars to drive, they're incredibly capable, but for the kind of driving that you're talking about, the sort of canyon carving
afternoon, one of the things about these cars and the way they're built and engineered quite well by Porsche is that finding limits in these cars is very difficult. They are extremely capable at gripping and gripping and gripping. When they lose their grip,
it takes the top tenth of drivers on the planet to save them.
What makes these, in my opinion, a bit dangerous to use aggressively on the street, because first of all, they're much wider than a lot of sports cars. These are really big cars when you get inside.
I always enjoy. I know I'll never be able to reach this car's limits. That's why I enjoy it, because it's always something new, you know? You never, oh, I'm tired of this now, because I can make it do exactly what it's supposed to do and no more. You know, the average person will never find their limits, and that way it gives you something new and exciting to do, you know?
But for me, the fun is in driving a 1967 911S, or even an '88 930 Turbo.
That can be very, very scary at the limit, both those cars, but they give you a hint about what they're going to do. Yeah. So, therefore, you can say, ah, it's just about to lose it, so let me modulate the throttle a bit. These, you keep your foot in to the wall, and it'll go as fast as you want, when you want to stop, press that stop pedal and the car stops now.
So, it can in some drivers engender a certain feeling of security and overconfidence that can be frightening.
You mentioned these cars I've bought and then I rarely see, like I would with Ferrari, an Enzo, 800 miles. So, almost every Porsche has a minimum of 10 or 12,000 miles.
Ads for these cars that sell for the big prices and they have zero miles.
Right. I just... The thing I like is whenever I read like the Car and Driver shootout or the Road & Track, which is faster, the people that show up are Corvette and Porsche and their cars have 60, 70, 80,000 miles. And then some of the Italian exotics show up and they're... Well, they don't really do it. They just show up. They don't want to push the car. They don't want to race the car. And they have very low mileage on it. But I never thought of any Porsches being low mileage. Because it doesn't even seem like it matters. I mean, because the car is capable of remaining exactly the way it is for the first 100,000 miles.
There are lots of them. Lots of them.
And that is also a great point that I love to bring up about the market in general and collecting and enthusiasm in general. To an ever-growing segment of the community, it's very sharply divided. There are people who are zero kilometer guys and there are people who want to get out in a car. They want to see a car that's been driven 80,000 miles, 100,000 miles, maintained scrupulously,
always taken to a Porsche specialist or the dealer, and used, and they know it from the club and they know it from events and all of that. And to me, that's the kind of car that most people would want.
And again, I just come back to the fact that these cars are meant to be driven.
They're designed to be driven. This one is the 997.1. It's a 3.6-liter engine, which puts out 415 horsepower. And they look in these cars to lighten them up wherever possible. As I mentioned, they don't have trunks. They use that space instead for venting. They've taken off the rear seats. They have a roll cage in place of it. Lightened panels for the hood panel. So, these are really designed to be track-focused cars.
Now, obviously, they still have
air conditioning. They still have radios. So, again, they are cars for the street. So, they're not totally stripped-out sort of hairshirt kind of things. But, nonetheless, they are designed to be very performance-focused.
The same brakes on each one. Yeah, same brakes on actually till we get to our last one. Our second car, the 2011, is a bit special because you hear Porsche enthusiasts wax eloquently about the Mezger engine.
