Four Porsche importers teamed up to build their own ducktail GT3
A 911 aimed at mountain passes instead of lap records
Almost every fast Porsche of the last decade has been sold on a number: a Nordschleife time, a peak power figure, a downforce claim. The 911 GT3 Bergsport, which Porsche shows on 1 September, is being sold on a road instead. A road that climbs, doubles back on itself, and keeps doing it for twenty kilometres.
It exists because four Porsche importers, in France, Italy, Austria and Switzerland, went in together on a car built around the tarmac outside their own showrooms. Porsche describes it as a tribute to alpine driving. If you live anywhere else, you will not be offered one.
When the brief comes from the importers, not Weissach
Regional special editions are not new for Porsche. What is unusual here is the arithmetic. Instead of one national organisation putting its hand up, four have pooled a single order, which is how a market of four countries ends up with a bespoke piece of bodywork rather than a paint code and a badge on the dashboard.
Porsche has been busy with this sort of thing lately. Britain got the Earls Court 51 edition, New Zealand got five bespoke GT3 Tourings, Japan got the Artisan Edition. The Bergsport is the same idea aimed at a mountain range instead of a country.
The ducktail is doing more than nostalgia
The signature is a ducktail rear spoiler, moulded into the engine cover as one piece of bodywork with the third brake light set neatly into it. Porsche has built ducktails before, most famously on the 1973 Carrera RS 2.7, where the shape earned the nickname Entenbürzel. It has never put one on a GT3.
It is the right call for the brief. A fixed rear wing is a circuit tool that asks for speeds a public pass will never legally allow. A ducktail tidies up the airflow and settles the rear without the drag, the weight or the shouting, which suits a car meant to be worked hard between hairpins rather than held flat out on a straight.
Underneath, expect the familiar 992.2 GT3 hardware: a 4.0-litre naturally aspirated flat-six making 502 hp and spinning to 9,000 rpm, around 1,420 kg, and a choice of six-speed manual or PDK. That engine is the part Porsche has promised will outlive the switch to electric, and on a mountain road it is the entire argument.
Bergsport is a motorsport word, not a marketing one
Bergsport means mountain sport, and in German it points straight at Bergrennen, hill climb racing. Porsche once took that discipline as seriously as it took Le Mans, winning the European Hill Climb Championship repeatedly through the 1960s with cars built around a single obsession: mass, and the removal of it.
The extreme was the 909 Bergspyder of 1968. It weighed 384 kg. Its 2.0-litre flat-eight made 275 hp. The fuel cell was a nitrogen-pressurised titanium sphere, the suspension used titanium, the wiring used silver instead of copper, and the ignition ballast resistors were carved from balsa wood. Two were built. Porsche published a fond piece about that spherical tank days before the Bergsport reveal date, which is not an accident.
What Porsche has not said out loud
A fair amount. Production volume has not been published, although a run of roughly 100 cars is the figure doing the rounds and would fit a four-market split neatly. Whether the manual gearbox is standard, optional or the only choice is unconfirmed, and so is the price.
One detail is worth straightening out before the reveal. This is not an EU-only car, however often it gets described that way. Switzerland is one of the four markets and is not in the EU. It is an Alpine car, which is a narrower definition and a considerably more charming one.
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The ducktail will take the attention, and it has earned some. But the decision worth applauding is the brief. Porsche has spent fifteen years letting the Nürburgring define what a fast 911 should be, and the result is a GT3 that is magnificent on a circuit and quietly wasted on the roads most owners actually have. Four importers looking at the Grossglockner, the Stelvio and the Col de Turini and asking Weissach to build something for that is the most useful request anyone has made of the GT department in years.
The catch is the one Porsche keeps handing us. The best versions of the 911 increasingly arrive with a postcode attached, whether that is a manual Carrera S sold only in North America or a ducktail GT3 for four countries with mountains. It is a lovely car and a faintly cynical business model, and both of those stay true on 1 September.
