My driving-school car was, well, I don’t remember. I know it was some 1990s GM full-size sedan, maybe a Buick Park Avenue. The point is that it was forgettable. It was not a Porsche 911 GT3 RS with a Manthey Racing performance kit.
Porsche announced on Tuesday that it now allows students to drive a 911 GT3 RS Manthey in its Track Experience driver-education program at Barber Motorsports Park in Alabama. Students get to drive the car in the three more advanced classes: The three-day Masters RS, the four-day Masters RSR, and the invite-only Masters TR. The RS and RSR programs are designed to get students an SCCA Full Competition license.
Photo by: Porsche
The GT3 RS is already the most hardcore thing Porsche makes, with a crazy aero package that helps it make about as much downforce as a 911 race car does at Le Mans. Manthey Racing is a Nürburgring-based Porsche subsidiary that, among other things, develops handling kits for Porsche GT models.
For the GT3 RS, the Manthey kit includes a larger splitter, dive planes, a larger rear diffuser, and a bigger rear wing. Oh, and a carbon-fiber panel with a shark fin that replaces the rear window. Porsche claims 2,200 pounds of downforce at 177 MPH—about 20 percent more than a standard GT3 RS. The car also gets stiffer springs, semi-active coilovers, and stainless-steel brake lines.
This is a good way for Porsche to get prospective customers into its hardest-core 911 yet and to show off its immense capabilities. But it’s also a great car for a racing school. With this much downforce and the same engine as a 911 GT3 Cup car, a GT3 RS Manthey is about as close as a race-car driving experience you can have in a road car. If someone’s going to Porsche’s Track Experience to learn how to drive real race cars, they could do a lot worse than driving in one of these.
Like the car itself, the program isn’t cheap. The Masters RS school costs $9,700, which is both a lot of money and about par for this sort of racing school. (Porsche doesn’t list pricing for Masters RSR or TR on its Track Experience site.) The cars are available for students now and will be at Barber until Spring 2026.
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