Few car manufacturers are as well versed at making exceptional sports cars like Porsche, and the 718 Cayman GT4 is one of its finest recent creations.
Powering the GT4 is a 4.0-liter naturally aspirated flat-six, although this is not the same engine as the 911 GT3 and is instead based on the 3.0-liter twin-turbo six-cylinder of the current 911 Carrera models. It pumps out 414 hp and 310 lb-ft (420 Nm) of torque, excellent figures for a vehicle that is this compact and driver-focused.
Mated to the engine is a six-speed manual transmission. While Porsche makes some of the finest stick shifts on the market, the gearbox of the Cayman GT4 is not perfect. In this review, Matt Farah says that the gearing of the GT4 is simply too long, just as it was on the previous-generation model.
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Porsche itself has admitted it got the gearing wrong on the car. First gear on the GT4 is good for 52 mph (84 km/h) while second tops out at 85 mph (137 km/h) and third continues through to 121 mph (195 km/h). If the car was turbocharged and had heaps of torque low down in the rev range, the gearing might not have been a huge issue, but the 4.0-liter of the GT4 needs to be revved to make use of the power.
When recently quizzed about the gearing by Which Car, the boss of the Porsche 911 and 718 lines, Frank-Steffen Walliser, said the brand is using an old gearbox with the GT4.
“The gearbox we have, don’t get me wrong, it’s an old one, an existing one and changing the gear was just technically not possible as we were running out of space on the shafts, if we need an adjustment there. We would have loved to have seen that, [the gearing] a little bit shorter, but technically there was no way,” he said.