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Although it has some Porsche styling cues, the GT9 is quite unlike anything that has ever emerged from Zuffenhausen. Long, low, and wide, it has a roofline that makes a production Porsche look as high as a truck. A much more graceful truck, perhaps, but a truck nonetheless. That means its door openings are not generously dimensioned for tall drivers, even though Fatthauer himself is a six-footer. You must climb in over a stout roll cage before dropping into a snug, lightweight racing bucket and buckling up the four-point race harnesses. Starting the GT9 involves turning the ignition key to the on position before flicking a switch in front of the gear lever to activate the fuel pumps. Only then do you turn the key all the way to fire up the flat six. When it catches, there is no sound-proofing to shield you from the full auditory force of the 4.0-liter twin-turbo six — and that’s about when you realize that you’ve just strapped yourself into a carbon-fiber and steel acoustic reverberation chamber. The clutch is a compound organic unit Fatthauer invented in a moment of inspiration. By using two organic clutch plates that are bolted to a steel center, he solved the age-old dilemma of combining the strength of a sintered racing clutch with the progression of an organic one. Thus, getting the GT9 off the line smoothly is no problem at all. With its one-off linkage, the gearbox is a bit less precise than a production Porsche’s — but finding the right cog is not an issue. The fact that you don’t use the gearbox much in a high-speed run means that shift quality and speed of shifts is irrelevant anyway. One drawback of the 235/35ZR19 and 325/30ZR19 Continental Sport Contact VMax ultra-high-speed tires is that, to achieve their rated speed with reasonable wear characteristics, they need quite a hard compound. That means they need to be warmed up well for optimum grip. However, as with a proper racing car, you need enough speed in the turns to warm the GT9’s tires properly. But that’s hard to achieve because the GT9’s combination of 987 horsepower and rear-wheel-drive does not allow you to push it hard enough in the corners to get the tires up to temperature. Truly, it’s a vicious circle. This means tip-toeing around corners in third gear to avoid lighting up the back end in lurid oversteer and then nailing the throttle on the straights in between. A corollary of the 4.0-liter twin-turbo flat six being built for an intergalactic speed record is that it is designed as a high-revving unit. High revs and tall gearing mitigate the effect of its torque when exiting bends, but also mean I never get out of the fourth of six ratios around Ascari. When Johnny Depp said, “Now, bring me that horizon” in Pirates of the Carri-bean, he could not have conceived of the 9ff GT9. But I could not get that quote out of my mind because the GT9 does not so much accelerate as lunge for the horizon. Where other fast cars get slower the faster you go, the GT9 only seems to go faster as it hits its stride. The only car I’ve driven that feels as fast is the awesome Bugatti Veyron, but the 2,923-pound GT9 leaves the 4,189-pound Bugatti 2.5 seconds behind in the 100-200 mph contest. The hefty, all-wheel-drive Bugger still wins the 0-62 mph sprint because the GT9’s rear tires simply will not hook up well enough in the lower gears. This is a car that does its thing best on the fly. With its turbos spooling full boost, the GT9 accelerates so rapidly that the right-hand kink after the hairpin halfway around Ascari — a kink normally taken flat in third in a 500-bhp car like a BMW M6 — suddenly becomes a corner. Because of the huge power-to-weight ratio and relative lack of grip, a confidence lift and even a dab on the brakes is in order both here and at Ascari’s even faster second right-hand kink, which can usually be taken flat in fourth in almost any other car. | |
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