Sandalwood
Emira Fan
- Joined
- Jul 15, 2024
- Messages
- 175
- Reaction score
- 247
- Location
- Chattanooga, TN, USA
- Emira Status
- Emira Owner
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Featured
- #13,681
I had the good fortune to get to spend a full day in the mountains with the green and yellow members of this squad, giving them the full beans and even getting to experience oversteer and understeer from both. My thoughts: The GT4 was very...normal...given the massive bolsters and the sharply jouncing ride quality. It certainly was not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but it wasn't brilliant. It felt like a very nice car in a world of lots of nice cars. And I was disappointed.Fantastic write up, I agree with most everything, especially the line: "...the most mechanical and raw you can buy in a new car at the moment."
I test drove both the GT4 and C8 a while back, both have their qualities of course. The C8 being an automatic wasn't nearly as engaging and despite being MUCH faster, just felt huge......not to mention everything felt a little too auto-magic when driving aggressively.
The GT4 manual was very nice to shift and sounds fantastic at those high RPMs. That ride though, way stiffer....makes my touring suspension Emira feel like an old Lincoln Town Car in comparison. You're right about the clearance height too, I scraped the bottom pulling into what I felt was a normal driveway. The manual I drove was similar performance to the Emira and really required keeping the RPMs hot......not terrible or anything, just that you'd expect more for the cost premium vs the Emira. Maybe if I was looking for a track car this thing would have been the winner?
The greatest sin of the GT4 is that I was already bored of looking at it from both inside and out.......I suppose that'll happen when your design barely changes in nearly 20 years.
The GT3 RS, on the other hand, was a revelation. Truly the greatest car I have ever driven, and I'm not a Porschephile by any stretch of the imagination. My wife and I actually tried to get ahold of a GT3 after this experience and learned what an exercise in futility that can be. If the GT4 RS carried over half an ounce of its big brother's DNA, it'll be brilliant. But then you're back to the aforementioned price/availability/looks issues that keep me still excited by Lotus.