How has the Porsche 911 Carrera T not been around for years? | Frankel’s Insight

I think Porsche used the ‘T’ again 30 years later because for all it lost, there was one thing the 911 T won. And won big. The 1968 Monte Carlo rally, courtesy of one V Elford Esq. Of course, Vic’s competition car was a very long way removed from anything a punter could buy off a forecourt, and the only reason the ‘T’ was used for homologation was that it had lost so much content it was the lightest 911 on sale.

But a win is a win. And when it’s your very first win at the top level in that particular discipline, it is something truly to be celebrated, even three decades after the fact.

When Porsche first launched the ‘new’ 911 T (officially a Carrera T), it was a run-out special for the old 991-series and Porsche did nothing to scotch the rumours that it was an exercise unlikely to be repeated. Yet, there was a new T midway through the first 992 series and now there’s another, right at the start of production of the so-called ‘gen 2’ 992. So whatever the ‘T’ formula is, it’s clearly working.

The basic recipe has stayed the same: use the standard engine, coupé-only bodywork, add some lightweight bits like thin glass, make the rear seats an option and install a limited slip differential as standard. And it should be the only 911 to ally said standard engine to a manual gearbox. The most recent T also added fatter wheels, tyres and a sports exhaust, too.

But this one goes further because now, unless you want (and can afford) to go shopping in the motorsport department for a GT3, this new T is now the only manual 911 of any kind you can buy. Which means that, just for a start, it is no longer possible to buy an open 911 with three pedals in its footwell.

More importantly still, at least for some, the manual gearbox is no longer the seven-speed unit seen in previous Ts – which was essentially a manualised version of the PDK double clutch gearbox – but the six-speeder familiar to drivers of manual Boxsters, Caymans and, indeed, GT3s.

A step back? Don’t believe a word of it. For once this really is a case of less (I should say fewer) being more. The seven-speeder of old had two problems: its shift quality, though improved through its lifetime, never got close to that of the six, and secondly, seven is just too many gears for a small brain such as mine. “You’ll get used to it,” I was told when I first encountered it. That was 15 years and who knows how many 911s ago, and I still haven’t.

So keen is Porsche to ram home the fact that this is a manual 911 – and a six-speed one at that – it even places stickers in the rear side windows and puts a little ‘MT’ badge by the gear lever just in case you forget.

But you never will. Even by the exalted standards we expect from 911 coupés these days, this is an outstanding car. On the right road it doesn’t take hours or even minutes to feel entirely at one with, but mere seconds.

I’m not sure the extra tyre width is doing anything other than adding weight you don’t want and grip you don’t need, but in all other regards the chassis is absolutely superlative, so well balanced, poised and good at feeding back information from the road surface, were it not for the fact it’s not that noisy and actually rides quite well you could almost mistake it for a GT product.

No, it’s not massively fast, at least on paper, but who cares about that when you’re having that much fun? Not me, for sure.

It's one of those cars you can’t believe has not been around for years, so essentially ‘right’ does it feel. Quite recently I spent a few delicious months in a standard Carrera and loved it, but during that time I swapped it for a few days with a seven-speed manual T of the same series and concluded that, for all the additional dynamism that the T brought, so good was the Carrera’s PDK transmission I was quite glad to swap them back again. Had it been this new Carrera T, however, they’d have had to come and wrench it from my cold, dead fingers.

In this modern era, when all of Porsche’s traditional rivals have long since abandoned clutch pedals and manual gearboxes, it’s reassuring to know that at least Porsche reckons there’s enough custom out there to keep the faith. To me, and certainly for the money, this is the best non-GT 911 you can buy. The best of the best you might say. It really is that good.