Shot head-on, this silver Porsche speedster fills the frame with that unmistakable low, bulbous nose — twin chrome-ringed headlamps, the crest badge and gold “PORSCHE” script sitting dead center on the hood, and barely any front overhang to speak of. The tan leather interior and thin banjo-style steering wheel are visible through the low windscreen, exactly the cabin you’d expect from a car built to be driven with the top down and the wind in your face.

The case against the current Porsche 911 GT3 is that it is too good. The controls are too precise, the chassis too composed, the engine too willing — it conceals how fast it is going and how close to its limits you are, which means you can arrive at speeds that require considerable competence to manage without having received adequate warning that they were approaching. This is not a criticism that would survive scrutiny in court, but it is the honest assessment of what makes the GT3 different from sports cars that communicate their limits more generously.

The air-cooled Porsche 911 market ran one of the more spectacular appreciation curves in modern collector car history. Cars that traded for twenty to thirty thousand dollars in the early 2010s reached six figures by 2018 and, in certain configurations, multiples of that by 2022. The 1973 Carrera RS 2.7 — the canonical desirability benchmark in the air-cooled segment — went from a strong-market price of around $400,000 to auction results exceeding $1.5 million for well-documented lightweight examples.