DOES IT WORK?
Suspension, downforce, differential and more can be adjusted with these controls.
The idea that Porsche’s 911 GT3 RS is a racing car for the road isn’t entirely true, because it actually goes further than that. Last time we checked, you can’t individually change the damper bump and rebound rates while driving in a 911 Cup or GT3 racing car. Instead, you have to stop, climb out and get your hands dirty.
Not so in the GT3 RS. Four colour-coded switches on the steering wheel allow you to adjust aspects of the vehicle’s set-up regardless of what speed you’re doing. These include compression and rebound rates for the front and rear dampers as well as the push and pull lock values on the rear differential. It’s spectacularly clever stuff that no other road car offers – but does it actually work? And if it does, can you appreciate it on the public road?
To find out, we started off with all the settings on their default ‘0’ preset. Then we drove down a winding stretch of Welsh B-road and – eventually – managed to find a hairpin where we were getting a touch of corner-exit understeer.
In order to remedy this, I increased the firmness of the front rebound setting and stiffened up the rear compression value, +2 on both. The idea being that, when exiting the corner under power, the weight balance won’t shift as far to the rear and thus create a situation where the front is unloaded (even more so than it usually is in a 911).
Sending it into the same corner again, the balance of the car on exit was noticeably improved and much of the understeer was dialled out. While driving the car on track on a previous occasion, I also had a go at playing with the differential deceleration settings to get a bit more rotation into slower hairpins, and the results
