The Ray Pank Winter Cup Round 2 Hillclimb

It was wet, windy and wild weather for the running of the Sporting Car Club of SA Hillclimb at Collingrove on Sunday 5th June. Members of the PCSA joined the event. Despite the weather the competitors made the most of the conditions. A special thanks to the competitor who gave me a lift down the hill during a really bad rain storm, It was very much appreciated. Thanks to Melissa Rees for all her help and encouragement.

The 2022 Porsche 911 GT3 has one analog gauge: the tachometer. It's huge, dead ahead through the steering wheel. And if you spec a GT3 with the six-speed manual transmission, it's a vital instrument. That's because, unless you own an early Honda S2000 or some type of Hayabusa-powered Ford Festiva, you're probably not accustomed to shifting gears at 9000 rpm. Shift by ear in the GT3, and you might grab the next ratio at 7000 rpm—which is, preposterously, short-shifting by a wide margin. So, you keep that tach in your peripheral vision, and when the yellow lights alongside it start to flash, that's when your left foot goes to the clutch and your right hand to the shifter. At 9000 rpm, it sounds as if the 502-hp 4.0-liter flat-six is trying to overtake the car itself. It sounds like a GT3 Cup car's engine back there. Which, of course, it mostly is.

The GT3's six-speed manual is a different animal than the seven-speed stick in other 911s, tracing its lineage back to the 2016 911 R model. While the seven-speed unit uses Porsche's clever "mechanically converted shift actuator" (MECOSA) to translate its PDK dual-clutch-automaticderived guts into an H-shift pattern, no such system is needed on the six-speed, which is gloriously easy to slot into the proper gear. It feels somehow frictionless until the soft crunch of engagement tells you you've hit the next cog. Revs climb— and fall off—instantly, as if the 4.0-liter has a fidget spinner for a flywheel. Mundane chores like parallel parking inevitably attract lookie-loos, so keep those revs up. Stalling a GT3 is almost as bad as stalling an airplane, in terms of embarrassment, if not consequences.

A manual gearbox suits a machine that's so thoroughly devoted to an unfiltered driving experience. Our $197,935 USD test car's limited selection of options was almost all related to speed or performance: $10,110 for carbonceramic brakes, $5900 for fixed-back carbon bucket seats, $230 for the extended-range 23.7-gallon fuel tank that maybe ought to be standard, given