Safer at speed: Taming the mid-engined Porsche 911 RSR-19

We meet at the Vallelunga circuit just outside Rome, where I’m allowed a lap in a 911 GT3 RS to learn the circuit. I haven’t been here in years, and I pull back into the pit lane no wiser than when I had departed. I’m a slow learner. I’m then strapped into the RSR-19, but not before I’ve not only inserted plugs into my ears but also had someone from Porsche tape a thick slab of sound-absorbent material over them to go under my balaclava and helmet.

I’m installed. I’m so tightly gripped by the seat and belts that I feel not so much sat down as plugged in. The seat doesn’t move, making the driver one more mass to stay centralised. Instead the pedals and wheel travel to me, the latter with more than 30 different controls adorning its face. Happily, I’ll need hardly any of them.

Just sitting here I experience a new level of intimidation, and at first it’s hard to figure out why. I’ve driven plenty of road and racing cars with far more power than this. It even has traction control. I conclude that it has something to do with the fact that this is Porsche’s current ultimate petrol-powered racing car and it’s being run for me by the official Porsche WEC team – the same team that watched Gianmaria Bruni put this very car on class pole at Le Mans this year. I can’t go out there and just dawdle about, not in front of that lot, but the price of getting it wrong can be measured in the number of subsequent invites to drive interesting cars that I will never receive as a result. There’s a balance to strike, and I simply have to find it. I need help, and thankfully Bruni is here to provide it.

“Don’t worry, it’s easy,” he says, leaning into the cockpit. “Don’t be scared to push; the car is fantastic, lots of downforce…” Bruni says some other stuff too, but I’m already being wheeled out of the pit lane on a trolley, spun through 90deg, dropped off the air jacks and asked to fire up the engine. The bang is so loud that it sounds like it has just grenaded itself. But no, that’s just what it does. I thank heaven for all that additional soundproofing for my ears.

The clutch is gentle, and that’s just about the nicest thing I have to say about the car after my first two exploratory laps. It understeers far too much, the traction control is butting in all the time and the brake pedal is far too long. One of us is doing something seriously wrong.

I suspect it’s me, and I reckon I know what the issue is. In that counterintuitive way often found with racing cars, the way to stop it sliding around and make it behave itself is to drive it faster, not slower. And then, almost at once, it makes sense. Heat builds in the brakes and they start to work, while the giant Michelin slicks reach their operating window and, in an instant, switch on. Air flows faster over and under the car, that gargantuan aero package starts to do its thing and I’m away. By the time I come back in, I’m grinning like a loon.

So they give me four more laps and finally I take Bruni at his word. The power still isn’t amazing, but the gearshift could have come from a Rolls-Royce it’s so smooth. At speed and with the wings working, there’s no amount of force my left leg can exert that can bring the tyres even close to locking up.

But all that is as nothing compared with the way it gets into a corner. It’s so stable that the entire entry phase is also a deceleration zone. I can stay hard on the brakes until I need to bleed pressure away to account for the diminishing downforce and then tread as hard as I like on the throttle, knowing that the electronics will keep me balanced right on the traction limit all the way to the exit. I’ve driven plenty of GT3-category racing cars but nothing that felt like this.