Precious Lessons Porsche 997 GT2

This is the kind of 911 hipsters won’t even know how to relate to. It doesn’t look good close to a fancy coffee-brewing machine and it would be too damn mean to enter a fashionable garage filled with air-cooled purists wannabes. As Juha Kankkunen would point out “911’s are for boys, GT2’s are for men”. Sure, it takes courage in throwing around any 911, but to really push the pedal to the metal in a GT2, one of the last, big a** turbo cars ever made by the GT cars department in Stuttgart, you really need to be a grown up. Partly because it is still one of those cars that still relies on your brain cells as its main traction control unit. Partly because there was a time when PR managers job was to advertise what mad engineers produced and not what they thought it would be “cool car”. Definitely because it was made for people who knew to drive properly.

If it would be presented now, the 997 GT2 would be difficult for the rich kiddos of Instagram to digest: you know, it takes some skill to drive and it is very humbling. There is no four wheel drive or pdk to save yourself from misjudgement, and nor it would not be the ideal toy to stroll down somewhere cool. It is just a regular old 997 Turbo with two wheel drive and some other tweaks from the Porsche racing people. It has a roll cage (optional but necessary nonetheless) and four point belts. Nothing fancy about this one then: the least thing you care about when you’re getting yourself to the redline is not the sound, and neither acceleration times. It’s keeping the damn thing away from crashing. It is a difficult car to drive, and honestly bless that. Even if we must admit we do not have the skills necessary to extract from it what a racing driver would do, it’s great nevertheless. Each time you accelerate or take a corner it teaches you very important lessons on what you need to know before you push it and…in the rain the values it teaches you nearly double the importance.

We’ve driver many cars hard, shifted many gears, but it’s never enough. The GT2 is a reminder that you never stop learning.

Many thanks to Premoli Automobilies