After two long months out of the saddle, I cannot tell you what a relief it was to be back behind the wheel of a fast car this week, hedgerows rushing past, the English countryside beyond them, a powerful combustion engine pulsing away behind me. If the Litchfield-tuned Porsche 911 Carrera T had turned out to be a complete dog, I doubt I would have noticed.
I first wrote about this car towards the end of 2018. At that point it had been upgraded with KW springs – stiffer than the stock Carrera T parts, but not significantly so – as well as Litchfield’s own geometry settings. The 3.0-litre twin-turbo flat-six had been tweaked as well, although only with a freer flowing Akrapovic exhaust and a remap. Power and torque both rose substantially, however, from 370hp and 332lb ft to 487hp and 450lb ft.
Skim-read the review I wrote a couple of years ago and you’ll see how much I adored that car. Gushing doesn’t come close. The extra power and torque made the Carrera T effortlessly quick in a straight line, while the slightly firmer springs and tweaked geo gave it a good dose of the steering precision and response of a 911 GT3. The uprated chassis dealt with a bumpy road with much the same masterful poise, too.
But Iain Litchfield is not one to stand still. Since October 2018 he’s carried on fiddling with his Carrera T – a 40th birthday present to himself – mostly busying himself with its engine. His car now uses the bigger, punchier turbochargers from the Carrera GTS. To those he adds his own lightweight billet compressor wheels for snappier throttle response, while tubular headers and sports cats liberate yet more performance. With power up to 600hp and torque now at 500lb ft, Litchfield’s car has gone from effortlessly quick to scarily so.
It wasn’t too long ago that that sort of power in a rear-wheel drive, manual 911 made for one of the most demanding sports car driving experiences going (the 2010 997-era 911 GT2 RS with 620hp was a genuinely fearsome machine). But the Litchfield car isn’t unnerving, nor too much a handful – it’s only when the engine rushes through 5000rpm and it keeps on hurling the car along the road with more and more force that your eyes widen, right foot pushing back involuntarily against what your conscious mind is telling it to do.
It has that searing, exponential rate of acceleration at the top end that makes McLaren’s supercars feel so shockingly quick. But it’s only frightening in that split second: everywhere else, this 600hp Carrera T is actually very manageable.
Once again, those old Porsche 911 attributes comes to the fore. I’ve driven plenty of tuned BMW M-cars and Mercedes-AMGs at this sort of power, but with their engines up front and the two driven wheels such a long way behind – their tyres pressed into the road surface by only two-fifths of the car’s overall weight rather than three – they are, almost without exception, a truly wild ride. Add a little moisture to the mix and you’ll get nowhere close to using all 600hp.
But a 911 can handle that sort of shove. Moreover, Litchfield’s engine map has been designed with manageability in mind. Those uprated GTS turbochargers could comfortably return a torque figure beginning with a six, but that would defeat the point. With 500lb ft and a power curve that rises in a very linear way, the engine behaves more like a big-capacity naturally-aspirated unit rather than, say, the explosive, very torque-rich forced induction motors you’ll find in a modern 911 Turbo.
Iain wanted to be able to use full throttle in third gear on a dry road. That was the main objective. Unlike a 911 Turbo, remember, this car doesn’t have four-wheel drive. In second gear, then, you’ll feel the rear end squirm and see the traction control light blink, but hook third, flatten the accelerator pedal and the car simply rockets away. No wheelspin, no TC intervention, just immediate shove that seems to build and build as the revs rise.
Everything I thought to be true about turbocharged engines is confounded by this one: it pulls hard from only 2,000rpm; throttle response is sharp; it spins to the far side of 7,500rpm. And all that from only 3.0-litres. Every other 200hp/litre turbo engine I’ve tried – tuned Mitsubishi Evos, the McLaren Senna – has been laggy, boosty and intractable by comparison.
Does 600hp in this particular model defeat the very point of the nimble, pared-back Carrera T? Perhaps, but these same engine upgrades can be made to any 991-era Carrera. The cheapest Carrera T in the PH classifieds is up for whisker under £70,000. Budget £10,845 on top of that for the full suite of Litchfield upgrades – KW springs and geometry, plus all engine upgrades including GTS turbos, the remap and a Remus rather than the Akrapovic exhaust – and you’ll have an exquisite 600hp 911 for the price of a 718 Cayman GT4 with a few extras.
I’m still trying to decide which way my fictional £81k would go. Given a second lockdown and another two months out of the saddle, I might even come up with an answer.
LITCHFIELD PORSCHE 911 CARRERA T
Engine: 2,981cc, flat-six, twin-turbo
Transmission: 7-speed manual, rear-wheel drive
Power: 600hp@7,400rpm
Torque: 500lb ft (>470lb ft@3000-6500rpm)
0-62mph: 3.5 secs (estimated)
Top speed: 195mph (estimated)
Weight: 1,500kg
MPG: N/A
CO2: N/A
Price: from £81,000 (for used car with £10,845 worth of upgrades)
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