We tour Targa Tasmania in the Porsche Cayman GT4

The footage, displayed on a phone in my co-driver’s hand, has me speechless. It’s shot from inside a well-driven Mercedes-AMG GT R which, aside from carrying monstrous speed, is confidently using both sides of the road.

Suddenly the grey AMG twitches left, its driver alerted to something behind. A second later we see it; a Dodge Viper that rips past in a blast of V10 fury and fireworks; titanium skid blocks on its underbelly exploding sparks as they kiss the ground. Speed? What looks like Mach 1. Commitment? Ten tenths. Welcome, dear readers, to the greatest tarmac rally in Australia.

I mention the footage for two reasons. The first is I had just driven that same section of road, wringing the neck of the first PDK version of Porsche’s (rather good) Cayman GT4 to arrive in Australia. MOTOR is part of the growing ‘Tour’ category at Targa and I thought we’d been pretty quick. I was wrong. The pace and commitment of the Viper’s overtake is a confronting realisation of just how hard the really fast guys are pushing.

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“So that’s what speed looks like...” I think to myself before playing the footage again.

The second reason carries a heavier edge. So fast and so on-the-edge does the Viper seem, and so close are the gumtrees and telegraph poles on either side of the road, that the clip serves as a graphic reminder of the forces involved should something go wrong. And this year, things did go wrong.

Targa 2021 will forever be remembered as a black year. Until now, Targa’s fatality rate stood at two deaths from 28 years of competition, but this year, that tally more than doubled. Three competitors died; their cars leaving the road and in doing so, casting a dark cloud of uncertainty over the entire event.

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Is Targa unsafe? Have the cars become too fast? Should the event be cancelled? The questions begin in earnest and are accompanied, inevitably, by a healthy dose of pearl clutching and handwringing. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves...

If Targa’s conclusion was black, its beginning couldn’t have been brighter. Finally able to return after a Covid-inflicted hiatus in 2020, the lead-up is thick with pent-up excitement. MOTOR is here with Porsche, partly to drive the PDK GT4 in a bid to answer a question that’s been nagging us for months “Is this a car where the auto might be better than the manual?”, but also to better understand the ‘Tour’ side of the event.

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The Tour category is becoming big business, not just at Targa Tasmania but also at Australia’s other tarmac rally events like Targa High Country and Great Barrier Reef. Multiple brands take part, including Ferrari and Lotus, but Porsche’s contingent is easily the largest. More than 40 Porsches are here to ‘tour’ in 2021, and the mix of metal is salivating.

There’s the stuff you’d expect – a GT2 RS, a skittling of bewinged GT3 RSs and a few brand-new 992 Turbos – but also plenty of surprises. A black 993 C2S catches my eye, as does a tidy 944.

Tour drivers tackle the same stages as the full-blown competition crews, with the added advantage of being the first cars on the road each day. The appeal is obvious: it’s a serious taste of Targa without the need for helmets or roll-cages, and offers owners the chance to explore their cars on Australia’s best bitumen without the worry of oncoming traffic. Or the relentless pressure of a stopwatch. Pace notes are forbidden and a 130km/h top-speed governs the field, but as one experienced tour driver tells me: “That’s only an issue on the straight stuff. Everywhere else its plenty fast enough.”

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It feels a tight-knit group too, and isn’t, as you might expect, a boys’ club. In fact, the majority of driver pairings are husband and wife, mixed in with father and son combos and lifelong friends. This year there’s a healthy dose of first-timers (see page 72 for costs and details), including Peter who has just bought his first Porsche after selling his company. “It’s a 992 Turbo S and only has 1500km on it, so yeah, I’m throwing it in the deep end!”

Peter is welcomed warmly into the fold by wizened old hands who share some sage advice.

“Mate, we’re taping up our cars tonight,” says GT3 RS owner Jerry.

“See us in the carpark and we’ll have a few beers and show you the best way to do it.”

Jerry is speaking from hard-earned experience; he didn’t tape his GT3 on his debut Tour and it proved costly.

“It wasn’t even six months old but I had to respray the entire car it was hit with that many rocks!”

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Time to drive. Targa’s first few stages are over suspiciously quickly, as though organisers want to play competitors in off a long run, but even these short, relatively open sections are enough to remind us of the GT4’s magic. The perfectly weighted controls, the precision of its steering, that instant sense of balance and feedback, it’s all there.

That Porsche is now offering the GT4 as an automatic is no surprise, yet it’s still significant. Both because it’s seemingly at odds with the purity of the original GT4’s rear-drive/atmo/manual driver’s car philosophy, and also because the fitment of a seven-speed PDK offers the chance for Porsche to fix our only real criticism of the manual GT4, its long gear ratios.

Yes, eye roll, those ratios. That second gear tops out at around 140km/h in the manual GT4 has been so widely discussed, so we won’t flog it into oblivion here. Personally I’ve never found it a major issue, although I will admit the prospect of a punchier gearbox to better lean into the heady heights of the GT4’s atmo 4.0-litre flat-six does sound tantalising...

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The seven-speed PDK gearbox itself is a doozy. Smooth and soft-edged on Targa’s many transit stages, it’s also telepathically fast and intelligent when you’re driving quickly. And it’s gifted the GT4 with a healthy turn of speed. Opting for the PDK trims a full half second from the GT4’s 0-100km/h time, meaning this is a 3.9 second car. Keep your right foot buried and the PDK retains a four-tenth advantage both to 200km/h and over the standing quarter mile.

And at Targa, you notice the extra urge. After the morning’s staccato stages, the afternoon is spent traversing the bitumen around Mount Roland, and the roads are phenomenal. Wait at the timing gate, floor it, and you’re quickly into the thick of it; Tasmania serving up a heady cocktail of fast sweepers with brilliant sightlines and narrow, technical sections with tightening apexes. And the GT4 simply devours them.

Riding on suspension that’s 30mm lower than a regular Cayman’s with firmer springs and adjustable rollbars, the GT4 is noticeably more focused yet it retains a lovely fluidity and balance. That’s crucial at Targa. Drive a car that’s too stiff here and you’ll forever be second guessing whether you’re about to be bounced off the road, but in the GT4 taut body control is paired with superb damping that breeds confidence rather than sapping it.

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And that engine. Revs define the experience and all of the hallmark traits of a great atmo donk are there: response, linearity, soul. Power in PDK versions remains unchanged at 309kW at a heady 7600rpm, but torque has crept north by 10Nm to total 430Nm. Wringing out every last rev and feeling the power and noise build as you climb through the rev-range is a true joy.

What’s immediately obvious, however, is that the ratios in the PDK remain relatively tall. I was hoping to write that the PDK had resolved the ratio issue, but first still stretches to an indicated 75km/h and second revs out to 128km/h. Are the long ratios the fun-sapping issue that some will lead you to believe? Not really.

And here’s something I wasn’t expecting: how much the deletion of the third pedal shifts the GT4’s character. Drive the manual GT4 hard and a big chunk of its joy comes from the sensation of nailing crisp upshifts and revelling in the accuracy of the shifter as you juggle heel-and-toe downshifts.

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Pedalling the PDK version yields a different kind of satisfaction. With no lever to consider, your focus moves to maximising the other elements at your disposal. You lean more on the chassis; your gratification now linked to how much speed you can carry into and out of bends.

The brakes are a standout, too. Tour cars are set off at three or five second intervals, so it’s inevitable you’ll catch the car in front at some point and there’s a perverse kind of pleasure that comes from closing another car’s gap in heavy braking zones. Carbon ceramics are a $15,000 option but the standard stoppers (GT4 scores six-piston calipers with larger 380mm discs) are so effective and the brake pedal so progressive, that I’d give them a miss.

Negatives? Targa’s transit stages are long enough for the tyre roar from standard Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2s to become irritating. And then there’s the question of noise. The 4.0 sounds great, but whether it sounds as great as it could be, is a contentious issue.

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Porsche Australia’s official line is that our cars aren’t fitted with the sound-numbing petrol-particulate filters that are standard in Europe and America. Yet speak with some owners over a beer at the end of the day at Targa, and you’re told a different story.

“They definitely have the filter,” says one.

“We’ve had our car on a hoist and I can show you where it is. Plus, you can hear it. This car isn’t as loud and doesn’t have the same rasp as my first-gen GT4.”

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This trading of intel and of sharing war stories of near misses and epic stages is a key part of the Tour’s appeal. Being the first cars on the road each day also means we’re the first back at the pub for dinner.

“This is what I love about the Tour,” says Manuela Marasco, who between herself, her co-driver Tim and her sister have pretty much cornered the market for Cayman Rs in Australia.

“It’s this sense of camaraderie. You finish mid-afternoon and have a meal and a drink with people who share the same interests as you.”

Day two dawns wet, miserable and freezing. This provides two realisations. The first is that Tassie motorsport fans are some of the very hardiest in the world. Hundreds of them line the roadside and wave as we zoom past. Entire families turn out to see the cars, which lends the feeling that the whole state is happy that Targa is back. It really is nice to feel liked and welcomed.

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And the second? Changing the grip level provides an abject lesson in risk management, weight transfer and keeping your inputs smooth. Our first stage is the famously demanding ‘The Sidling’; a serpentine stretch of blacktop that climbs and plunges just outside of the village of Springfield. In the dry it’d be driving nirvana. In the wet, it’s treacherous.

Watching a GT3 wobble hopelessly off the road in front of us is all the reminder we need to keep things in check, although it’s also clear that we’re contending with another side to the GT4. Deliver a clumsy input in the dry and the Cayman will mostly shrug it off; try the same in these conditions, on Cup 2s that need temperature to work, and it’ll rap you over the knuckles. It’s never unpredictable or nasty but on mossy tarmac, the GT4 offers no excuses either. If you under-deliver, that’s on you, pal.

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MOTOR’s Targa stint only takes in the first two days, meaning we’re bugging out four days early. So it’s time to make some conclusions. That the PDK version of the GT4 is a welcome addition to the Cayman range is an obvious one. It’s noticeably quicker and subtly more focused in its intent than the manual, but is it better to drive? That’s harder to answer.

If speed and eking out every last tenth are your priorities, the PDK is superior. But if you place just as much emphasis on the experience of driving as you do outright performance, then the manual still reigns supreme. Personally? I’d stay with three pedals.

And the Tour? Like the rest of Targa’s future, it hangs in the balance as Motorsport Australia investigates this year’s tragic incidents. Yet one thing is quite certain: if you love driving, events don’t get much better. And you needn’t be a squillionaire to take part. Porsche’s event is expertly run but for all the GT3s, Aventadors and 812s, there’s also a strong contingent of Renault Meganes, BMW 135is and Toyota Supras, all here enjoying their cars on Australia’s best roads.

Oh, and that aforementioned hard-charging Viper? Well, a Dodge Viper did win, but just not the one we saw shooting sparks as it flew by.

Fittingly, no one on the podium sprayed champagne.

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Want to get involved?

Want to Tour? Here’s what you need to know. Getting in early is a must. Porsche runs between 40-50 cars in the Tour class each year and spots fill up fast.

Any Porsche owner can participate and this year, the total cost reached $11,800 per car. That covers everything: transport of your car, hotels and all meals, stickering of your car and full technical support.

It works out to be roughly $1000 per person, per day. Six days sound like too much of a commitment? Porsche also runs tour groups at Targa High Country and Great Barrier Reef, which run over three days.