DREAM THEATRE
SOME MOMENTS JUST STICK IN THE MIND. It’s early October, 2005, and my feet crunch onto the expansive gravel frontage of a rather grand Tuscan hotel, the sort of establishment that until a year or so earlier I’d been completely oblivious about, before I commenced this privileged gig driving and writing about cars. It is my first Porsche new car launch, a real pinch-myself moment as in front of me is a sweeping arc of 987-generation Cayman S models, meticulously lined up, mostly in dazzling Speed Yellow and Guards Red.
Oh how I fell in love with that car on those testing, scenic Italian lanes, but it didn’t take long for dreams to ferment in the mind and to imagine how extraordinary it would be with a 996 GT3’s Mezger-series flat-six nestled amidships. Watching independently brewed Cayman VLN race cars at the Ring in subsequent years didn’t help, but when it came to the factory’s efforts for a hardcore Cayman, things moved at glacial pace. First there was the 2008 gen1 Cayman Sport; then the lovely 2011 gen2 Cayman R. And then in 2015 something very special indeed, in the form of the 981 Cayman GT4, as Porsche put its conservatism and innate protectiveness of the 911 to one side and made a Cayman with a
