The spectacular 911 GT3 is the first ever car to win our Handling Day contest three times
Bad weather, an unfamiliar circuit and equally unknown public roads made Autocar’s annual Britain’s Best Driver’s Car (BBDC) shootout divisive in 2025. It’s a good job the adjudicating testers aren’t like a trial jury, then, needing to come to a unanimous verdict before being let out of the pit lane.
There can be no deadlock at ‘Handling Day’: everyone has their say, casts their own scores, and the voting system unfailingly settles on a winner. And last November, in the Cumbrian damp of M-Sport’s Dovenby Hall test track and its surrounding roads, it promoted an old master to the top step of the podium one more time.
The 992.2-generation Porsche 911 GT3 Touring was an outside bet to scoop the big prize in some ways. It wasn’t among the competition’s top ranks in terms of price, power or accelerative performance. It didn’t have the 12-cylinder pomp of the Ferrari 12Cilindri, Lamborghini Revuelto or Aston Martin Vanquish. It didn’t have a thousand hybrid horsepower or asymmetrical torque vectoring via synapse-quick electric motors.
It was run close by a defending champion, in the shape of McLaren’s excellent and assured Artura PHEV supercar. But, in the end, the GT3 rose higher than them all. It used its unmatched powers of analogue simplicity and predictability, of tactility and communication, and its three pedals and manual gearbox to carve through sodden conditions, to make its more technically complex rivals seem overcomplicated and to put our testers at sufficient ease to enjoy themselves. Only one of the five judges scored it anywhere other than either clear first or joint first – so even if we had needed unanimity, chances are the arguing wouldn’t have taken all that long.
Should we have been surprised? Well, on the day, and with such a strong field of newer rivals, we certainly were but on the basis of recent BBDC history, we certainly shouldn’t have been.
Cars qualify for the BBDC starting grid by being either wholly or partly (but meaningfully) new from a material point of view and also being among Autocar’s favourite 10 driver’s cars of the year. By that standard, the 992.1-generation GT3 qualified in 2021 by being all-new and brilliant to drive and it duly won. Then it won again in 2022, as the defending champion, because the year’s winner always comes back by default.
Except when it doesn’t. In 2023, we found ourselves in a quandary and ultimately opted to include the box-fresh GT3 RS in place of the ‘regular’ GT3, because having two GT3s on the BBDC starting grid seemed heinously unfair on everyone else. The technically correct thing to do, perhaps, but not the right thing. And then the Anglesey rain fell – and fell and fell – and the RS was outdone by the Lamborghini Huracán Sterrato.
Had we denied Porsche the first three-time consecutive champion in almost four decades of unbroken BBDC history, effectively on a technicality? Had the 992 GT3 been robbed of its rightful, exceptional status? And if so, by what? The British weather? Its own success and fecundity? We will never know.
In 2024, the new, GT3-adjacent S/T qualified for our annual shootout, only to fail to appear as the result of a last-minute safety recall concerning its centre-lock wheels.
All of which means GT3s of some description have entirely legitimately qualified for four of the past five editions of BBDC; have won three of them; and might well, if things had worked out only slightly differently, have strolled the entire lot.
It’s not a stretch to imagine how that could have happened: the GT3 is just that good. In 2025 it got in because it deserved to, thanks to new suspension hardware, new wheel geometry, new steering tuning, revisions to its 503bhp atmospheric flat six and shorter gearing. And in the end, nobody could contend that it wasn’t worth the glory.
So the awesome 992 GT3 has gone down in Autocar history as the first-ever three-time BBDC champion – finally, controversially and very deservingly indeed.
