Porsche Is Reportedly Cooking Up A 4.0-litre Cayman GT4 RS

As much as we love the Porsche Cayman GT4 - and we really love it - you still get the nagging sense it was held back ever so slightly.

Here was a Cayman that had at last been given the engine it deserves, in the form of the 3.8-litre flat six from the 911 Carrera S. But Porsche still chose to knock 10bhp off the output before dropping it into the Cayman, as some sort of reminder that the 911 is top dog, despite the ‘lesser’ car having the optimum mid-engine layout. But no matter, as Porsche is apparently about to make A Cayman that’s even more powerful.

According to reports in both Auto Express and Autocar, the incoming, facelifted 911 GT3 - which will have a manual gearbox option, by the way - will use the 4.0-litre flat-six seen in the GT3 RS and R, potentially with the same 493bhp if not more. So what has that got to do with the Cayman? Well, both publications are also reporting that - according to their sources - that same 4.0-litre flat-six will make it into a Cayman ‘GT4 RS’.

This sounds almost too good to be true, but the more you think about it, the more it makes sense. Even Porsche admits the previous GT4 was far more popular than expected, so a follow-up of sorts makes sense. And with the 718 Cayman S being considerably quicker than its predecessor, a GT4 RS is going to need a lot of poke to sufficiently elevate it from the rest of the range.

718 powertrain chief Matthias Hofstetter told us last year that packaging restrictions would make installing the 911 Carrera’s new turbocharged flat-six impossible without massive changes, so the retuned RS 4.0-litre N/A makes sense. It wouldn’t have as much power as the GT3 and GT3 RS of course, since that’d cause all sorts of problems for the track-focused 911s. But, if it gets the 430 or so bhp figure speculated by Autocar, it’d do what the last GT4 didn’t: go beyond the Carrera S in terms of power.

A small Cayman with a really sorted chassis and a screaming 4.0-litre engine? Assuming this all happens, that’ll be one hell of a car.