Could the new six-cylinder 718 Cayman Touring be the perfect Porsche sports car?

WHEN PORSCHE launched the four-cylinder 718 Cayman and its Boxster soft-top sibling back in 2016, most Porsche fans shrugged and viewed the downsized turbocharged engine as a necessary evil.

Sure, it made the numbers in terms of both performance and emissions, but something significant had been lost in terms of purity and charisma.

It seems Zuffenhausen was listening.

While the four-cylinder engines will continue to make up the lion’s share of 718 sales, for those buyers who crave an atmo six-pot, Porsche reintroduced the powerplant in the Cayman GT4 Clubsport, the basis for racing cars which used a 313kW/425Nm 3.8-litre flat-six massaged up 30kW over the old 981 Cayman GT4.

A six-speed twin-clutch transmission with a mechanical limited slip differential, 380mm front brake discs and 911 GT3 Cup suspension made a mouthwatering ready to race package.

The costs involved in creating this limited-run track-only vehicle also made it clear that a road GT4 was in the works.

911 GT3 Touring

Now it seems that there’s set to be another spin on the six-cylinder Cayman theme – the 718 GT4 Touring. Just as the old 991 GT3 Touring was a GT3 that had all of its aggressive track-refugee styling pared back, Porsche is likely to offer the Cayman GT4 with a low-key styling optic.

Ask many Porsche fans what they’d want from their perfect Porsche sports car, if they could design it from a clean sheet of paper and it would be a mid-engined chassis, rear-wheel drive, an aggressive diff and a naturally-aspirated GT powerplant that revved to the heavens.

And a fair degree of them would like that recipe clothed in something that wasn’t the colour of a packet of Skittles, that didn’t have a rattling roll-cage and wasn’t encumbered with a rear wing that could looked as if you’d just driven off the grid at the Bathurst 12 Hour.

That car is the 718 Cayman GT4 Touring.

Spy shots from testing at the Nurburgring show a car with much the same rear diffuser and exhaust setup as the forthcoming Cayman GT4 and Boxster Spyder models, but with a front apron that’s Touring-specific.

The cars circulating at the ‘Ring were also all fitted with carbon ceramic brake discs. Similar cars were seen in Sweden undergoing cold weather testing in February, so this latest sighting would seem to rubberstamp our suspicions. Porsche is building the wish-list Cayman.