The Best Thing About The Porsche 911 GT3 RS Is Its Shifter

It's amazing how few cars seem to have their automatic shifters the 'right' way round. The GT3 RS does, and it's awesome to use

Matt Robinson

11 Jan 2017

The Best Thing About The Porsche 911 GT3 RS Is Its Shifter

A few weeks ago, I named the GT3 RS as the best car I drove in 2016. That got me pondering why I loved it so much, and it struck me that one of the most memorable things about it was the PDK automatic gearbox’s shifter.

I can almost hear you all switching off right now, but stick with me. By shifter I don’t mean the steering wheel-mounted paddles: no, I mean the one integrated into the gear selector itself. Mostly because it’s the right damn way around.

As someone who’s grown up watching rally cars and racing cars with sequential gearboxes that are shifted with a ruddy great pole that’s pulled toward the driver to change up, that’s instinctively what I want to do when using these kinds of gear selectors. And yet a huge amount are set up the wrong way around.

Perhaps it’s because to the average Joe it makes sense that forward goes up a gear, but to me it seems plain wrong. And out of the performance cars I’ve driven recently that do have these kind of selectors (many cars have either buttons or - in the case of Mercedes - column-mounted shifters), it’s a complete mix of some getting it right and some wrong.

The Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio and BMW M4 get it ‘right’ for instance, whereas the Audi R8 - in fact all VW Group cars I can think of - the Lexus GS F and the Volvo V60 Polestar all get it ‘wrong’. In fact most Porsche shifters up until recently were ‘backwards’.

Thankfully that’s not the case anymore, and in the GT3 RS with its violently efficient dual-clutch gearbox, it means you’re in for a real treat when gunning through the gears. I actually found myself using the satisfyingly girthy, part aluminium selector as much as the paddles, pretending I was behind the wheel of some monstrous 1980s racing car at Spa Francorchamps.

Perhaps it’s weird to pick out something small like this as the most memorable part of such an astonishing car, but it’s something which has really stuck in my head. As the cool kids like to say on Instagram, #takemeback…

Growing up on a diet of World Rally Championship highlights and lengthy Gran Turismo 2 sessions, a life in cars was as good as inevitable for Matt.

Comments

Kinda reminds me of this…. Good job, Porsche.

I love the PDK on my car <3
Not only the actual shifter is perfect with correct directions for “up” and “down”, the paddles are perfectly weighted as well, they chunky and are made of aluminum rather than cheap plastic (ahem.. new NSX.. ahem)
Not to mention that the gearbox is lighting fast, responsive and “honest” (it doesn’t upshift even if you hit the redline)

My lancer Ralliart is the same it’s awesome. Except the paddles are plastic 😕

Here in america, manual gearboxes are just assumed to be a communist plot.

“Communist” the american 2017

Its more of a difference in opinion on the automatic gearbox…

Except you forget that American cars are pretty much the only ones that even bother offering a stick version of their top end cars anymore.

Lol. I love being the only kid I know who knows how to drive stick here.

German engineering at its finest!

THANK YOU! This should be mandatory. Pull back to shift up, push forward to shift down. Somehow only Porsche and BMW remember how a shifter is supposed to work.

Triptronic was the other way around…

Mazda does it right too, Mitsubishi did it right, but only on the EVO MR

BMW was the first time i saw it done wrong, back in a 90s 5-series. I can’t.for one second think why it would be done that.way, not even for “average Joe”.