ROAD RACER

Truly pure driving experiences are hard to come by in todays production automotive market, with technology taking centre stage. However, if you look in the right places, you might just find something a little bit special. Putting the driving first, Porsche's little gem is raw driving pleasure.

You will struggle to find many performance production vehicles available on the market today that can deliver a raw driving experience, largely due to the shift in transmission use to an almost exclusively automatic offering - often with the coinciding paddleshift option. However, every now and again, someone comes up with something that does just that, and more often than not, it comes from Porsche's athletic stable.

The 718 family is the perfect place to find such a machine and the latest 718 Cayman GT4 brings a traditional automotive ethos very much up to date. The purity of its character appeals to sports car enthusiasts who delight in unadulterated driving pleasure and appreciate an incredibly high level of agility as well as an almost intimate proximity to its power.

Adopting the perfectly balanced mid-engined layout, both the 718 Spyder and Cayman GT4 share a technically identical base for the first time ever. Included in this is the incredible, newly developed 4.0-litre six-cylinder naturally aspirated engine, paired with an engaging six-speed manual gearbox.

At the heart, the 4.0-litre six-cylinder boxer engine - which is based on the same engine family as the turbocharged motors in the current 911 Carrera model series - is a high-revving powerplant which generates 420 PS - 35 PS more than the previous GT4and a peak torque of 420 Nm available between 5,000 and 6,800 rpm. What makes this car somewhat unique in today's market is that manual gearbox that is capable of breaking the 300 km/h (186mph) barrier. The 718 Cayman GT4 can reach a top speed of porsche.com/uk