New 911 GT3 RS tyres extend trackday season

Specially designed Michelin PSS5 take 10 seconds off a wet lap - no excuses left to keep it in the garage

Another day, another set of new factory tyres for a yellow Porsche. Much like the recent Carrera GT announcement, this latest rubber release from Porsche - now for the latest GT3 RS - is heartening; as value of these iconic supercars only seems to rise (or at least hold very high) so Porsche is giving customers all the tools required to be out driving them as much as possible.

A Pilot Sport S 5 is the latest tyre option for the 992 RS, the model’s previously available Michelins being a Cup 2 or a seriously extreme Cup 2R. While the former is undoubtedly a great circuit tyre, and won’t throw you off at the first sign of damp, it clearly isn’t best suited to inclement conditions - the kind we get a lot of in the UK. Anybody with Cup 2 experience in the UK probably also has a story of things getting a bit sketchier. Hopefully not in a GT3 RS.

So the PSS5 is here for those days when the weather isn’t ideal, but there’s a track day booked you’ve been looking forward to for weeks. Or it’s at Spa, where it always rains. This new tyre has been designed specifically with wet weather in mind, and has been in development since 2022; Jörg Bergmeister was on hand again at Michelin’s facility in Lochaux for fine-tuning. The tread pattern features four large 7.4mm central grooves as greater tread depth shifts water out the way better. There’s also more silica in the compound to aid purchase in the wet and help the tyre get up to temperature.

Porsche and Michelin reckon the Pilot Sport S 5 ‘shows its optimum properties’ between 4 and 15.5 degrees celsius, which sounds like a balmy spring day at Silverstone. Crucially, that’s the sort of temperature zone that a Cup 2 isn’t really interested in and ought to make a GT3 RS fun even in less-than-optimum conditions. Porsche says the tyres still communicate and inspire confidence, rather than just prioritising outright grip; that being said at Michelin’s 1.7-mile test track, the Pilot Sport S 5 was more than 10 seconds faster than a Cup 2. Testing at Portimao and the Nurburging when it was above 20 celsius - remember that? - apparently demonstrated ‘a high level of performance outside its core operating window.’

No reason not to, right? Particularly as they should last longer than the Cup tyres. "We are responding to demand from our particularly performance-focused customers who have expressed a desire to spend more time on track during spring and fall,” Andreas Preuninger said. “The new tyres significantly increase the annual operating window of the 911 GT3 RS."

Perfect - the car is one of the greatest road racers ever made, and we can never really rely on warm, dry weather in the UK. More GT3 RS more of the time sounds like a no-brainer. For now, the new set of 275/30 ZR 20s and 335/30 ZR 21s are launching in the US, but surely they’ll be in drizzly Britain soon enough. Let’s hope RS use can increase with them - a dozen of the 992s on PH are showing fewer than 1,000 miles…

In case you missed it, PH has an exclusive deal currently running with Michelin for cashback on its tyres - see full details here

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GreatScott2016

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