They don’t call Monza the “Temple of Speed” for nothing. Except for three chicanes added over the decades, this is as classic a racing circuit as they used to be—a couple of straights connected by fast right-hand corners. Lewis Hamilton’s 2020 pole lap here was at an average of 164.267 miles per hour. If you want to go faster on a closed circuit, you’ll need an actual oval.
Monza is maybe one of the few race tracks where you can really experience what the new Porsche 911 GT3 RS is capable of. Pirelli laid a GT3 RS on its OEM-fit Trofeo RS tires for us to drive at its media event for the new P Zero family. You can read about the rest of the tires here, but this experience required its own story.
The 992-generation GT3 RS has been out for a few years now, and I’d driven it on track previously, but that didn’t prepare me for what it was like at Monza. This car’s radical aero package generates 900 pounds of downforce at 124 mph and 1,895 pounds at 177 mph. Few road cars can match that downforce figure, and you’ll need a hypercar to beat it. The figures are broadly comparable to what a 911 GT3 R race car would run around a high-speed track like Le Mans… or, for that matter, Monza.
Photo by: Porsche
Photo by: Wikimedia Commons / Will Pittenger
Obviously, downforce creates drag, which reduces top speed. That might sound like a bad thing at a place like Monza, and yes, in a racing environment, you wouldn’t want to run too much wing here. But Monza’s two ultra-fast right-handers, Curva Grande at the top, and the Parabolica at the bottom, let you experience the full effects of the GT3 RS’s downforce. It feels otherworldly.
To better describe this, it’s worth briefly explaining how tire and aero grip work. A tire has a maximum grip level in both lateral and longitudinal acceleration, measured in G-force or simply “G,” which is the force on our body exerted by acceleration in any direction.
You can plot out that force in a 2-D circle on a graph, which is helpful for looking at how combined lateral (turning) and longitudinal (accelerating and braking) forces a tire can take before losing grip. You might be able to corner, accelerate, and brake separately at a maximum of 1 G each, but if you’re accelerating and turning at the same time, you can only have a portion of each direction’s maximum achievable grip.
This friction circle is ever-changing, impacted by the wear level and temperature of the tire, slip angle, the friction coefficient of the road surface, and the vehicle’s weight transfer under acceleration, braking, and turning. If you go to racing school, you dive deep into all of this, but what you need to know here is that on its own, a tire is only capable of taking so much lateral and longitudinal acceleration before losing grip.
Photo by: Pirelli
It is a vast oversimplification to say that, in cornering, pure mechanical grip from the tire alone decreases with speed past a certain point… but that’s basically the case. Aerodynamic grip, created from downforce-generating wings, splitters, diffusers, etc., essentially makes the 2-D traction circle bigger. But what’s especially interesting is that downforce rises with the square of speed: In other words, aero grip increases with speed. Not infinitely, of course, because the tires can only handle so much, but enough that it fundamentally changes your approach to driving.
In practice, it goes like this. Curva Grande is really just a flat-out run from the slow first chicane to the less slow second chicane. Mentally, I couldn’t get myself to keep my foot to the floor.
My experience isn’t uncommon. If you’ve spent your track time in low-grip road cars, or even race cars with high mechanical grip but little to no aero, getting your head around downforce is tricky. Intellectually, you know what the car can do—or at least you have some concept of it—but getting yourself to go against your instincts honed through years of prior driving experience is hard. Especially when you don’t want to ball up someone else’s Porsche GT3 RS.
With another session, ideally after a look at a data comparison between me and someone quicker, I could’ve maybe gotten there. But I had a hell of a time regardless. The feeling of G-force on your body as you accelerate through the corner and downforce rises is like nothing else. I’m thankful this car has bucket seats and six-point harnesses, because if it didn’t, I don’t think I could hold myself up.
Photo by: Pirelli
The feeling of G-force on your body as you accelerate through the corner and downforce rises is like nothing else.
Then there’s the braking. I decided to be a bit conservative, but still brake a little later than I did in the Carrera GTS. Even I knew I could go deeper in this car because of the downforce, but I’m still too early. There’s something a bit demoralizing about arriving at corner entry far slower than you need to be, but for me, that gives way to astonishment at what the car is capable of. It forces you to rethink what’s possible, and the added context of a “normal” sports car like a Carrera GTS just makes what the GT3 RS does that much more astonishing.
The Parabolica might be the best corner on the track, though the surprisingly quick Lesmos runs it close. Despite looking fairly tight on the track map, it’s fast, and you get back to power so early, the car seemingly straining against its limits, until it (and you) can take a breath on the main straight.
I don’t want to say the GT3 RS is a race car for the street, because in some ways, it’s more advanced than a 911 GT3 race car, with its adjustable differential, active aero, and, well, the fact that it’s got a nice leather interior. But not much else with a license plate quite delivers the same race-car experience, and at a place like Monza, that’s especially obvious.
Photo by: Pirelli
For as alien as the car feels to someone of my experience, it’s also very approachable. The car isn’t nervous, it just dares you to up your game to match its capabilities. And a huge credit to Pirelli for making such a friendly tire in the Trofeo RS. The company’s engineers all talk about maintaining a nice plateau of grip once you’re past the tire’s peak, rather than a sudden drop-off. Maybe the peak isn’t quite as high for one fast lap, but realistically, the tire offers more speed for longer.
There are other tracks where you can take full advantage of the GT3 RS’s downforce, but not many are quite so evocative. Even beyond its “Temple of Speed” nickname, there’s something vaguely religious about the place. Maybe it’s Italy, where everything inspires that sort of reverence.
Or maybe it’s the way that the RS’s 9,000-rpm flat-six noise echoes between the grandstands, the trees, the bridge on the way to the variante Ascari, and everywhere else. Maybe it’s knowing you’re at the one of the oldest purpose-built tracks still in operation in the world, second only to Indy.
It’s a place for the indoctrinated to worship, and no points for guessing my beliefs.
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