Porsche Carrera GT Phenomenal 600+ Bhp Exotic Supercar

A street-legal racer best sums up the Porsche Carrera GT, now being produced in limited numbers. It is based on a car built to race in the Le Mans 24 hour race, but the project was cancelled, so here we have a production version - more powerful and faster than the prototype, with a maximum speed of 205 mph!

Imagine it. Here you are set for your first drive in the Carrera GT, and you've wisely decided to try it on a track. They've already warned you that the lack of a conventional flywheel makes starts a little tricky, so you don't mess about. You get the revs up to about 3,000, let the clutch in, and off you hurtle. No wheel spin thanks to traction control - and the massive rear tires, which are over a foot wide, transmit all that power to the road. Three seconds later, you're doing 50 mph, and you grab the gear level and pull it back to second. Before long you've snarled your way up to about 8,400 rpm and just over 80 mph, and you snick into third.

V-10 engine will feel as if power is unlimited

The track is still straight ahead, fortunately, so you push your foot down again, and feel the lusty V-10 engine take you up past the ton to about 110 so far you've been driving for about 10 seconds! You try one more gear, feeling the adrenaline pumping, and let 570 bhp push you forward yet again, until you see the speed build up to over 145 mph.

Suddenly a corner comes up. You over-react and slam on the brakes hard. No dramas. They're so powerful, these ceramic discs, that you've slowed too much for the corner.

It is easy to accelerate through the corner, and the car just sticks to the road. Poor road surfaces, you find later are not so kind to the Carrera GT it doesn't like them. But on smooth surfaces, you can manage a controlled rear end slide - and know instinctively that this is a maneuver for race tracks only.

Masses of control at 'normal' cornering speeds

Now, there's a long straight, and soon you're changing from third, through fourth to fifth and life gets interesting as the speedo registers over 150 mph the speed at which the governor cuts in on so many cars. Not here. At 170 mph you push into sixth, and watch the end of the straight and the speedo. Just as you're nudging toward 200 mph, and the acceleration has lost all it's bite, you start to brake for the fast s-bends, and do a bit better this time, swishing through completely under control at the sort of speed where dramas occur for normal cars, but not for this one. Then there's a short straight, a fast curve and into the pits.

You know that this is going to be a mighty exciting and 'risky' car to drive on the road not because it's unsafe, of course. It's risky because of the sheer power which means that you're always going faster than you intend - not 10 or 20 mph but 30-50 mph! Also risky in that unless you can drive it in Germany and a few other deserted places, the police will be on to you before you get into third gear! To give you some idea, at 200 mph, you'll cover about 300 ft in the time it takes to put your foot on the brake pedal, let alone slow down.

Advanced technology just like a Grand Prix car

Still, this Porsche Carrera GT is a masterful vehicle for all that. How does it do it?

With really new and advanced technology, not just in the use of a carbon fiber composite body/chassis but in many details as well. Heart of the car is the 5.7 liter V-10 engine, which is slightly larger than the prototype. To give plenty of revs, the bore is much bigger than the stroke, and output is a staggering 612 bhp at 8,000 rpm without turbocharging. This is more power than the engine of the 2003 Le Mans 24 hour race; the Bentley 8 managed on about 500 bhp.

To get this power and engine speed reliably, Porsche engineers have used titanium for the engine connecting rods it's very light and strong, and is used on fully-fledged racing engines, and on some Honda engines.

Unusually in a road car, but common in a racing car, the engine forms part of the chassis, stiffening the rear of the composite frame. It sits very low in the frame, so the Porsche engineers had to come up with a two-place clutch and do away with the flywheel - the input shaft to the six-speed gearbox acts as a light flywheel.

When many racing car and quite a few supercars have automatic or semi-automatic sequential gearboxes, it is a surprise to find that Porsche has stuck with a manual gearbox, even though the box is completely new. Fine for racing, but with the limited speeds you use on the road, the sixth speed is a bit of a bore I guess in this car you'd hardly use it on the road.

The ceramic disc pads are a definite advance fade free from 200 mph, shorter stopping distances, and they reduce unspring weight. But expensive, which is why they are only on supercars and upwards at present and only a few of those.

Amazingly stiff body tub

Without doubt, the most remarkable feature of the car is the body structure which is made up of many different pieces of carbon fiber and resin to produce an immensely strong and rigid tub, in which the driver and passenger sit, and which also houses the Grand Prix type suspension. A stunning piece of engineering.

To keep the wheels at the right angle to the road, there are double wishbones front and rear, acting through push rods to the centrally mounted springs, and the steering is power assisted. To suit the road, it is quite low geared, with several turns lock to lock.

With all that technology, the Carrera GT should be a lightweight. It weighs 3,000 lbs, which makes it less than the tiny Audi TT 3.2 liter, but about 200 lb more than the Ferrari Enzo. The Enzo has another 50 bhp on tap, should you be a real power freak!

Nevertheless, like the Enzo, Porsche Carrera GT is a car that is near a racing car as you can buy. Porsche plans to build 1,500, and as about 1,200 have already been ordered, they will certainly hit that target.