The 996 GT2 doesn’t care about your feelings. 462 horsepower. Rear-wheel drive. No traction control. Porsche had been building turbocharged 911s that could kill you since the 930, but they’d also been slowly, reluctantly, adding ways to save you from yourself. The GT2 was the last one where they didn’t bother. The last car to earn the name Widowmaker without anyone rolling their eyes about it.
It was also weirdly ahead of its time. First production Porsche with ceramic brakes as standard. Carbon fiber on the door panels, throughout the interior. More of it than Porsche had ever put in a road car at that point. Porsche made 963 of the pre-facelift cars. Around 70 of those were Club Sports. Roll cage from the factory. Fire-resistant seats. No carpet. The kind of car that lets you hear every single thing happening underneath you, and some of those things rattle.
Kamil Dubiel owns one of each. “I don’t think I ever imagined I would be able to drive these cars,” he says. He owns both a standard GT2 and one of the roughly 70 Club Sports. The standard car is, according to Kamil, the best looking 996 ever made. Hard to argue. The wide body, the fixed wing, the vents. It gets thumbs up and questions everywhere it goes. But the Club Sport is a different animal. Stiffer. Louder. Less forgiving and proud of it. “You can hear everything even more,” he says. “Sometimes something rattles.” He says this like it’s a feature. It is.
What matters to Kamil is that these cars get driven. He’s got time in a 997 GT3 Cup car. Says the GT2 is the closest thing on the road to that experience. “It’s definitely a brutal car that doesn’t forgive mistakes,” he says. Though it will sometimes warn you before things go sideways. Sometimes.
He doesn’t care about straight line speed. He wants mountain roads. Tight turns. A clean entry and a clean exit. The kind of driving where you have to be completely in it or you’re going to have a very bad day. “Turns are for fast drivers,” he says. “Straights are for fast cars.” It sounds like a bumper sticker until you watch him drive. Then it sounds like something else.
Every time he gets in, he says the same thing happens. Five kilometers in, fifteen, fifty. Doesn’t matter. The way it accelerates, vibrates, the sound of it, the manual gearbox that makes you work for every shift. “You tell yourself that this is amazing.” He’s been telling himself this for a while. The car hasn’t argued yet.
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Report by Kris Clewell for petrolicious.com
