You’re going to buy a Porsche. Maybe a little red one, like the little red Porsche model car I used to play with, with my grandmother, when I was a kid. There’s something about a little red model Porsche that sets off a spark in the brains of young gearheads, and something about a real little red Porsche that sets off a spark in the brains of older ones.

So. Your new Porsche: maybe an extra-frisky, extra track-ready and extra-exclusive one? With sounds and moves and classy looks fitting of a world-class sports machine? A real gentleman’s performance car. This sounds legit, yes?

Two options come to mind: the 911 GT3 and the Cayman GTS. These two top-track-dog, go-fast rocket-coupes both came online in the recent past, and though they’re very different, they’re also very similar.

But you’ve got to choose one. Just one. Oh, the horror.

After being tasked with driving these two hot Porsches, done two ways, your writer offers up the following comparison of this pair of rides, in several scenarios, to help you decide on one – if you’re lucky enough to have this sort of problem.

Cayman GTS vs 911 GT3 Specs

Specs. Figures. Numbers. You need these to spout off to your pals while smirking, to brag about in online forums, and to validate your choice in one of these two rockets. Here’s the nutshell: The Cayman GTS, which launched to put the athletic GTS badge on a mid-engine Porsche for the first time in a long time, gets a slightly tweaked 340 horsepower, weighs 1,420 kilograms if you get the manual (which you should because that would be badass), and does 0-100 km/h in about 4.8 seconds. That’s at about $85,000 to start for GTS grade, which includes a plethora of standard go-fast goodies you’d have to otherwise add to lesser Cayman models.

The 911 GT3, which is just bananas, will relieve you of about $64,000 more, punches the horsepower figure to 475, weighs as much as the Cayman GTS with a small passenger on board, and knocks the 0-100 km/g figure back to 3.5 seconds or so. It only comes with a seven-speed PDK transmission, since a manual would call your clumsy arms and legs and feeble muscle fibres and ligaments into the shifting experience, slowing things down compared to the solenoids and electromagnets and computer algorithms used here instead.

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