The Porsche 911 GT3 is famously naturally aspirated, a status that’s becoming rarer and rarer among today’s supercars. Porsche teased about a year ago that its gold-standard track weapon will have to gain powertrain assistance of some variety—either through electric motors or, more likely, turbocharging—to comply with incoming Euro 7 emissions regulations. That might explain these new images of what looks to be a 911 GT3 prototype lapping the Nürburgring that’s largely unchanged on the outside, save for the shape of its rear bumper—and how it sounds.
Look closely at the 911 GT3 in these shots captured by our spy photographer and note the shrouded strip of bodywork right below the taillights and above the space for the license plate. It’s anyone’s guess what this camouflage is concealing, though ventilation seems like a reasonable one. The diffuser also looks different, with four vertical slats on either side of the center dual exhaust (the current GT3 has three on each side) plus what appears to be an additional pair of exhaust pipes at the fringes, pointed down at the ground.
Those rear-end tweaks might be easy to miss at first glance, but there’s clearly a lot going on with this 911. And they’re only half the story, as an Instagram video courtesy of joelre98 shows this very car at speed at the Green Hell, accompanied by an unmistakable whoosh.
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That does indeed sound boosted, which could mean a few things. First, this could be the 992.2-generation 911 GT3 RS, just like Porsche warned almost a year ago. If that’s the case, then not only is the free-breathing engine a thing of the past, but likely so too is its 9,000-rpm redline. The writing’s been on the wall, but it’d be a shame all the same.
The other and, frankly, far more preferable reality is that this is actually a mule for a 911 GT2. Unlike the GT3 series, turbocharging is in the GT2’s blood, and we haven’t yet seen a GT2 in the 992 generation; the last one ended production back in 2020. Whereas the current 911 GT3 RS tops out at 518 horsepower and 343 lb-ft of torque, the previous GT2 RS (there was no non-RS variant) reached 690 hp and 553 lb-ft, despite weighing just 44 pounds more. And Porsche might not stop at strapping a pair of turbos onto the next GT2’s flat-six, based on an old report that the future range-topping 911 could also gain endurance racing-derived hybrid tech.
One way or another, there’s a new super-911 in the works with boosted power; we’ll just have to wait a little longer to find out precisely which badge it’ll wear. You can peep the rest of the spy shots of this test car below.
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Backed by a decade of covering cars and consumer tech, Adam Ismail is a Senior Editor at The Drive, focused on curating and producing the site’s slate of daily stories.
