A full-face helmet does little to take the edge off the 9000-rpm shriek of a naturally aspirated 4.0-liter flat-six when it’s mounted amidships just behind your seat, as it is in the 2022 Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 RS. It’s very loud especially in the power exiting a slow corner, then bang through the gears on our way to storming headlong into a banked sweeper at Streets of Willow Springs raceway.
Porsche Cayman GT4 Holds A Mid-Engine GT3 Inside
It’s a prime example of what a Porsche engineer told us in matter-of-fact terms: “Whenever the GT4 RS engineering team came to a development crossroads, made a point of always choosing the path of greatest performance.” Boy, does it show.
Likewise, the RS’s seven-speed dual-clutch automatic transmission gearing is more aggressive than the Cayman GT4’s, instead using the tightly spaced cogs of the GT3’s gearbox, in which seventh gear tops out at just 0.84:1 instead of a lazier 0.71:1. Beyond that, the Cayman GT4 RS is more aggressive than the GT4 in the final-drive department, with short 4.17:1 rear-end gearing instead the regular GT4’s taller 3.89:1 final-drive. The end result is a GT4 RS claimed top speed that’s rev-limited to 196 mph in seventh gear. Porsche also claims a 3.2-second 60-mph time and an 11.3-second quarter-mile, but Porsche usually sandbags such numbers.