Specifications
About This Car
The 911 GT3's engine, dropped into the lightest open-top Porsche on sale, roof off and redline at 9,000 rpm
Porsche builds exactly one roadster with a race-derived, naturally aspirated flat-six sitting behind the driver's shoulders, and this is it. The 718 Spyder RS borrows its 4.0-litre engine straight from the 911 GT3's parts bin, forged pistons, titanium connecting rods and all, tuned here to 493 horsepower and a 9,000 rpm ceiling that turns every full-throttle pull into something closer to a race car's soundtrack than a road car's.
The chassis comes from the Cayman GT4 RS, the hardest-edged 718 Porsche builds, so the roadster inherits genuine track-bred geometry rather than a softened interpretation of it. A lightweight removable hood replaces the folding roof entirely, carbon fibre panels shave weight everywhere Porsche could find it, and the PDK gearbox is the only transmission offered, tuned for the kind of split-second shifts a manual simply can't match at this pace. 100 km/h arrives in 3.2 seconds, and the car keeps pulling to 308 km/h, an open-top figure few roadsters at any price come close to.
This is the last combustion-only car Porsche will ever build on the 718 platform, and it drives like the company knew it and decided to make it count.