Performance

Brendan says:

Like Dan, I found the Boxster GTS to be one of the best cars I’ve driven all year, and with a six-figure price tag, it had better be. The open top provides an enhanced sensation of speed you don’t get with the Cayman GTS, and having lapped on track with both cars, the 10-hp power difference between the soft and hardtop two-seater Porsches is completely negligible. Ignore those who would praise the Cayman’s greater rigidity: either you like the wind in your hair or you don’t.

In GTS trim, the Boxster’s 3.4L pancake-six makes 330 hp at 6,000 rpm and 273 lb-ft at 4,500–5,800 rpm. Lusty stuff, and it sounds wonderful, but winding it out necessitates handling some extremely tall gears. If you’re at redline in second, it’s triple-digit time, both on the speedo and on your subsequent moving violation.

The seven-speed PDK gearbox spreads things out a bit, but the six-speed manual is still a delightful choice. It’s been good here since the beginning, unlike the 911’s early seven-speed stick, which was a bit of a dullard. Were it not for the Boxster’s preference for 94 octane fuel, this is the sort of combination you’d love to use for exploring the upper half of the province, out there on the empty roads, free from adult supervision. It’s a wonderful car, a get-up-early machine, and possibly even better to drive at real-world road-speeds than the new GT4 Cayman.

Jump into the Corvette, and there are several first impressions. First, all Corvettes smell the same, a sort of blend of glue and plastics that’s not the equal of that whiff of leathery Porsche. Second, olfactory indications aside, this Corvette interior needs to apologize to no one. Snap one dial into touring, dab at the traction control a single time to put it into a looser mode, and slot the shifter into D.

Ah yes, an automatic Corvette. Where’s my Hawaiian shirt? While the ‘Vette’s Right Stuff image has been the stuff of legends for years, slotting an automatic into one of these things implies that either you’re a drag racer or perhaps a retiring retiree. (That’s not ageism, by the way, I recently rode shotgun with a retired gent that snapped the six-speed shifter of his manual triple-black ‘Vette through the gears en route to setting some extremely quick autocross times.)

However, here the Corvette now gets an eight-speed automatic transmission to handle its 455 hp at 6,000 rpm and 460 lb-ft of torque at 4,000 rpm. It’s the equal of that found in the Jaguar F-Type, easily capable of doling out the power without being too much of a bummer. In Sport Mode, the shifts are quick enough on the way up to give Porsche’s PDK a run for its money, and on the way down the prodigious torque helps cover any of that hydraulic mush you sometimes get with a conventional automatic.

Further, this Corvette is equipped with the 3LT feature load, but not the Z51 handling package. Uh-oh: it may be packing 455 hp and a staggered 19/20-inch wheel layout, but this is clearly the worst Corvette you can get for a performance test. It’s the cruiser version, and we’re up in the back 40 twisty-bits. Worse, it’s up against the best iteration of the Boxster you can buy, short of the larger-engined Spyder.

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