How a terrifying 53G crash proved just how impressive this entry-level Porsche is
A day at the races for the Boxster, visiting its competition cousins in the Porsche Sprint Challenge
The Boxster is well and truly back in action. Since returning from the bodyshop, it’s racked up an awful lot of miles, ferrying me to tests, photoshoots, airports and a few racetrack visits: Goodwood for Members’ Meeting, Castle Combe for a trackday, and Brands Hatch – to visit the Boxster’s racing cousins in the Porsche Sprint Challenge Great Britain.
Supporting the British Touring Car Championship, the Sprint Challenge is a one-make series for GT4-spec 718 Cayman Clubsports, organised by Porsche Motorsport GB. This means the race cars have plenty of shared DNA with our road-going Boxster, the Cayman’s roofless twin.
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‘The race car and road car are virtually identical structurally, the main difference being the roll-cage,’ explains front-running driver Tom Bradshaw of the Toro Verde GT team. ‘The lap-time advantage comes from bigger brakes, racing dampers, slick tyres and more power: the engine is the 4-litre, 500bhp flat-six from the 911 GT3 Cup car. The gearbox is the road car’s PDK transmission, with a different final drive.’
That’s a handy 100bhp or so advantage over the similarly sized flat-six in our Boxster, although it still looks the part rubbing silver shoulders with the cambered slicks of the race cars lining up in the assembly area. The racers are based on the body-in-white from the 718 Cayman GT4 RS rather than the regular 718, for its unique vents and airbox relocated to the interior. The Sprint Challenge has two classes, one for the GT4 RS race car, and one for the older 3.8-litre, 420bhp non-RS car. Drivers in both classes are further divided into Pro and Am categories, according to their experience.
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‘The joy of the Cayman Clubsport is that it’s a turn-key racing car, effectively,’ says championship manager Ian Fletcher. ‘You can race the cars in our championship, and you can race them elsewhere too; Caymans from this series could win in British GT and other endurance championships.’
‘The car’s set up to be a lot more aggressive than the road car but it’s still very forgiving, and there are driver aids including race-spec ABS,’ Bradshaw adds. Porsche Motorsport insiders suggest the top drivers tend to drive without the traction control and stability control engaged, whereas new drivers to the championship might lean on them as they learn the car and the circuits. Overall championship leader going into Brands Hatch was Clean Racing’s Toby Trice, who also endorses the car’s user-friendly nature: ‘It’s an easy car to drive fast straight away; although the geometry’s a lot more racy than the road car, someone who’s come from trackday driving could be quick straight away.’ (In fact, there is one driver on the grid, Alister Weston, who is completely new to car racing.) Trice joined the Challenge two years ago: ‘I began in rental karting; I started because I found it good for my mental health, then found myself getting quicker and quicker, and moved into Ginetta racing before entering the Porsche Sprint Challenge in 2022.’ Trice led the championship last year before a serious crash curtailed his season. ‘It’s a testament to the car’s safety that I wasn’t badly injured,’ he says. ‘It didn’t impact the roll-cage greatly; the front crumple zone absorbed a lot of the energy.’ How big an impact was it? 53 g. The same as Romain Grosjean’s accident in Bahrain in 2020. But without the fire thankfully.
Underlining the championship’s competitiveness, the top six in qualifying were covered by less than 0.2 seconds. Watching from the pit wall, the wall of sound as 23 Caymans and 138 horizontal cylinders blast past is deliciously savage. The racing, too, is fierce and closely fought, but the drivers are largely very well behaved, despite the pressure of live TV coverage. Of the three races at Brands, Bradshaw takes one win and Trice claims two.
‘Sprint champions have gone on to do the Carrera Cup [Porsche’s flagship UK championship] and on into GT racing,’ Fletcher says. ‘We’ve had a driver start with us as a novice and go on to Le Mans. Sprint Challenge fills that gap between club racing or trackdays and the Carrera Cup. It would be too much of a jump to go straight there: that’s a wicked car, 520 horsepower, but with the engine at the rear, the handling is completely different. The Cayman is a lot more neutral-handling, it’s a lot safer. Still, the front guys are very fast…’
At the end of the season, Pro class winners are awarded the use of a Cayman GTS 4.0 road car for a year. They’re in for a treat. I loved watching the action at Brands Hatch but it was even more fun exploring rural Kent on the way there and back in the Boxster. The Cayman GT4 RS may be a sharper platform for a racing car, but roof down on the lanes of the garden of England in spring, the Boxster GTS 4.0 feels about as satisfying as a road car can be. It’s very good to have it back.
| Total mileage | 9901 |
| Mileage this month | 2212 |
| Costs this month | £0 |
| mpg this month | 26.9 |
This story was first featured in evo issue 335.
