What's the news?
While the road-going Porsche 718 Cayman might have become a four-cylinder vehicle in recent years, the six-pot version is gaining a new lease of life as a concept rally car called the GT4 Clubsport.
Based on the 385hp GT4, with its 3.8-litre, normally-aspirated flat-six, the Clubsport will be used at the ADAC Rallye Deutschland as the course car, which runs the routes ahead of the main pack. The Porsche is a concept study for the FIA R-GT category and the test run in Germany will provide a useful shakedown for a rally machine that's derived from a circuit car - as the GT4 Clubsport has been campaigned globally on track since 2016.
Romain Dumas, the French rally driver, will steer the Cayman GT4 Clubsport around the rally stages and he's a talented motorsport all-rounder - he's won not only Le Mans, but also the Pikes Peak hill-climb four times. Porsche's factory drivers Richard Lietz (Austria) and Timo Bernhard (Germany) - he of that ridiculous 5m 19.55s lap of the Nordschleife recently in a 919 - were also involved in the test programme for the Cayman GT4 Clubsport concept rally car.
That mid-mounted, 3.8 boxer six powers the rear wheels only on the Clubsport, via a Porsche dual-clutch transmission (PDK) with paddle shifts on the steering wheel. For rallying, the whole underbody has been fitted with protection and there's an energy-absorbing foam element in the doors - the same as fitted to full WRC cars.
Anything else?
This test at the German rally will determine whether the Clubsport becomes a customer car in the mid-term. Dr. Frank-Steffen Walliser, Porsche's vice-president for Motorsport and GT Cars, said: "We're looking forward to seeing how the rally world responds to our FIA R-GT concept study. I would like to invite every interested driver and team principal to visit the service park and take a close look at our rally concept car. Based on the feedback and the interest from potential customers, we will then decide by the end of the year whether we'll develop in the mid-term a competition car for near-standard rallying based on a future Porsche model."
The ADAC Rallye Deutschland runs from August 16-19 this year.