Driven! The Bonkers New Porsche 911 GT3 RS Must Be Taken on Faith

Humans have five senses with which to interact with and understand the world around us, but they don't always give us satisfactory answers. Mankind has devoted much of its history to developing tools to understand things its senses can't. Since we can't all be experts on everything, we often have to accept what those tools and the experts using them tell us. The nearly inconceivable capability of the road-legal 2023 Porsche 911 GT3 RS is one example of things we just have to take on faith.

It's not that Porsche hasn't earned the benefit of the doubt. The 911 line has proved itself time and again as a superlative set of sports cars and supercars. The company hasn't truly screwed up one of these cars in decades, so there's no reason to suspect it will suddenly do so now, least of all on its flagship model. Plus, we already drove the 2023 Porsche 911 GT3 RS at Silverstone, but the experience occurred in stereotypical British weather that blunted our speeds and consequent driving impressions—though we easily recognized just how bonkers the car is.

The thing about aerodynamic downforce is, it generally works better the faster you go. Scientifically speaking, it's a force acting on the car pushing or pulling it down against the pavement. It's right there in the name. You can't see it, and it's unlikely you have the tools at home to measure it. You know it's created by managing airflow all around (and under) the car with wings and things, and you know it puts more pressure on the tires and increases their grip. Whatever it's actually doing and how much of it there is, well, we just have to believe.

Automakers give us numbers, but we don't have the tools to verify some of them, either. Usually, those numbers are correlated to speeds you'll never come close to approaching on the street and will be hard-pressed to reach on most racetracks. Sure, you can still brag about your spec sheet at your local Cars and Coffee gatherings, but you have no way of knowing whether the numbers are legit. Pro tip: If someone tells you they can actually feel the downforce working in their street car, they're either lying or they don't know what they're talking about.

That is, unless they own a 2023 Porsche 911 GT3 RS. We've tracked more than enough street cars to know you almost never actually feel the downforce doing anything, even though it is. The wild-looking GT3 RS, with its almost comical number of vents, scoops, vanes, and wings, is different. The uninitiated may think it looks like someone wiped out a Pep Boys, but every one of those pieces and details is functional—so much so that, yes, you actually can feel the downforce working.

To prove it (again), Porsche invited us to the Thermal Club near Palm Springs, California, for another go. We'd finally drive a combination of the North Palm and Desert Circuits, which feature a bit of elevation change and far more interesting corners than the South Palm Circuit we've driven several times in the past. This, of course, meant we'd be unfamiliar with both the car and the circuit, so it was time to learn by doing.

As a strategy, nailing the curbing and sending two wheels in the air while apexing a corner that also happens to be the peak of a small hill on your out lap in a car you've never driven on a circuit you've never driven isn't always advisable. Destabilizing a car like this could get you into trouble, especially if you chose the wrong line and don't have enough room to correct what happens next. In the new Porsche 911 GT3 RS, it turned out to be the quickest way to learn to trust the car and believe in the aero.

That's because nothing happened. The left wheels came off the ground, we had just enough time to think "uh oh," then the left wheels came back down and the car continued on the line we'd chosen as if nothing had happened. It's a lesson we'd learn repeatedly as the laps added up: The GT3 RS lets you do all kinds of things you'd be hesitant to try in other 911s lest things go catastrophically wrong.

Take the carousel corner just after the front straight, for example. It's long, there's zero camber, and trying to carry any real speed would immediately result in terminal understeer in any other street car. Not this one. The 911 GT3 RS has the grip, thanks to its downforce, to carry enough speed that lateral g pins you against the seat bolsters all the way around the turn. Sure, it'll eventually push wide if you get greedy, but you need only back off the throttle slightly to bring the nose right back in line.

Then there's the chicane coming back from the circuit's northernmost part. Steel safety barriers are notably close to the track on the outside of both corners, meaning the initial sharp right and the follow-up higher-speed left. Your first instinct is to brake slightly on the short straight leading to the chicane, but have faith in the car, and all you actually need to do is lift off the throttle long enough to turn in, then go back to maintenance throttle through the transition, then roll back onto the power all the way to wide-open throttle after the second apex. The car sails beautifully through this section where you'd reasonably expect the rear end to dance around in most cars.

From there, it's back to the esses where we learned our first big lesson on the out lap. It's almost as if they're designed to make a rear-engine car get loose, but now we know this car can absolutely attack the curbs and shrug it off. Suddenly, there are multiple lines you can take through this section depending on your driving style. The car doesn't care.

The most important thing to remember about downforce is the opposite of what we said earlier: When you slow down, it goes away. In super-tight hairpins, even this car has to slow down significantly just to get around the corner. If you don't think ahead, you'll plow straight into the corner with an armful of steering and even more understeer. Suddenly, you have normal Michelin Pilot Cup 2R grip again (not downforce-enhanced grip) and a rear weight bias.

More than any production car we've driven recently, the 2023 Porsche 911 GT3 RS teaches you to be patient in those super-tight, super-slow corners. It doesn't matter what the car can do in the fast curves; you still have to take the slow ones properly. It feels like an eternity waiting and waiting to turn in, only getting back on the throttle gently at the apex and staying out of it until you've unwound the wheel. But do it right, and you instantly know how much quicker you were through the corner than all the times you did it wrong. You can feel it.

In an era when Dodge sedans have 700 hp (or way more than that), it's easy to sneer at the measly 518 hp coming out of the GT3 RS' naturally aspirated 4.0-liter flat-six. This car, though, proves once again Enzo Ferrari was dead wrong when he said, "Aerodynamics are for people who can't build engines." Remember, this car ran a 6-minute, 49-second Nürburgring lap, 8 seconds quicker than the 887-hp Porsche 918 Spyder with its high-performance hybrid V-8 and torque-vectoring front electric motors.

We wouldn't necessarily describe this Thermal configuration as a power track, but we have no doubt the minimum speeds the GT3 RS carries are so much higher than the average street car that it would have no problem embarrassing higher-powered supercars on just about any circuit. It may not be as fast down the straights—though it is damn fast when the actuators on the rear wing and under the nose automatically switch the aero settings from maximum downforce to minimum drag—but its ability to go back to maximum grip when you brake and turn into a corner makes it a track assassin.

The more you drive it, the more you realize more power isn't your first ask. Instead, you start eyeballing all those knobs on the steering wheel. Knowing you can individually tune everything to your liking, from the damper stiffness to the limited-slip differential lockup to the traction control, makes you want to spend countless hours and laps dialing everything in. Porsche reps on hand during our drive told us that during the 911 GT3 RS development program, they'd send multiple pro drivers out on the same track at the same time, and they'd all come back with different settings. There's no one right answer in this car; it's all about the driver.

We've lamented this before, but the term "race car for the road" is an overused and almost always poorly chosen cliché. Race cars are very different from street cars, and they drive a lot differently. At least, they used to. Porsche says this 2023 911 GT3 RS on street-legal tires will turn a faster lap than a 911 Cup race car on slicks.

To be sure, we asked longtime Porsche racer Patrick Long. He's driven every manner of 911 race car, and he's driven this new GT3 RS. If anyone would know if the car actually drives like a purpose-built 911 competition car, it's him. His assessment? It's the real deal. The new GT3 RS drives like an actual race car on the track.

Are you ready to believe?