In the fourth and most recent episode of The Grand Tour, the new Amazon Prime motoring show from Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, we take a look at a grudge match between two of the best hardcore sports cars on the market. The BMW M4 GTS and Porsche 911 GT3 RS are both stripped out, hardcore variants of standard sports cars. But which one is better? Clarkson attempts to find out.
First up is the Porsche 911 GT3 RS. It must be noted that Clarkson isn’t really a fan of Porsche. While he respects the 911 and understands that it’s a good car, he doesn’t much like the people who buy them. So the brand has a tarnished look in his eyes. However, he simply gushes about the 911 GT3 RS. It’s hard not to, with a free-breathing 4.0 liter flat-six engine that makes 500 hp and revs to 9,000, rear-wheel drive, four-wheel steering and some genuinely brilliant aerodynamics. It’s an astonishing car that’s both incredibly impressive and incredibly exciting, two things that don’t always go together (See: Nissan GT-R).
Next up is the BMW M4 GTS, a car that, frankly, has a bit of an advantage in this test, as Clarkson is a fan of BMW. However, things don’t go as swimmingly for the BMW as they did for the Porsche. In fact, Clarkson doesn’t seem to like the BMW M4 GTS much at all. It actually seems like he hates it. First, there’s the ride quality, then there’s the loud interior noise, the lack of any sort of practicality and the fact that he doesn’t much like the water-injection system. Normally, people find that the M4 GTS makes up for all of this by being brilliant to drive. Clarkson feels otherwise and doesn’t like the way it drives either. He feels it to be sloppy and overly twitchy.
However, despite all of his negative remarks towards the BMW M4 GTS, Clarkson still deems it the winner. Why? Simply because Richard Hammond owns a Porsche 911 GT3 RS and not an M4 GTS.
Though, it’s clear to see which car is the winner, though. Especially when the M4 GTS does a timed lap around the track. The Grand Tour’s tamed racing driver Mike Skinner, “The American”, takes it out for a lap. Despite the M4 GTS being a very fast car, the BMW (or “British Motor Works” as Skinner calls it) is actually more than two seconds slower than the 911 GT3 RS around the track. In fact, it was even slower than the standard Porsche 911 Carrera 4S. And, it was only a second faster than the far cheaper and far less powerful Porsche 718 Boxster S.
That’s not a good look for the M4 GTS, unfortunately.
