By Tim Harris, Blair Smith & Shinoo Mapleton · June 11, 2026

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Tim's update this week is a ZR1X build update — and a partial victory.

Back in studio, the show this week is really about one argument — the Porsche GT4 gearing debate from two episodes back came back at us hard on Instagram, and Blair spent the week driving six different cars to test what he was actually saying. The result was a meaningful shift in his thinking about modern performance cars.

Let's get into it. 👇

We aired Blair's argument about the Cayman GT4's gearing two episodes back. The clip went up on Instagram. The Cayman/Boxster community arrived.

A sample of the comments, read on air:

For the record, since the algorithm strips context: Blair has owned two 981 GT4s. He has tracked multiple of them. His argument from the original episode was specifically about road driving — that the tall gearing puts the fizz zone of the naturally aspirated motor (4,500–8,000 rpm) outside of normal road speeds in any gear except second. On track, where you can actually use second through fourth at the speeds the gearing was designed for, the GT4 is phenomenal. That's been his position all along.

Shinoo's broader observation, from years of selling Lotuses: roughly 20% of his customers never get a car into its second cam. They aren't revving the cars they own. So a meaningful share of any sports car community simply isn't experiencing the limitations of long gearing — because they're not pushing the car into the rev range where gearing matters in the first place.

That's the context. What Blair did this week was test the question more broadly.

The original mission was practical — replace the 2021 BMW 330i daily, and possibly the E46 M3, with something more consolidated. The execution sprawled. Blair drove six cars in seven days, none of them an obvious daily-driver replacement:

He came home with nothing — but the trip rearranged how he thinks about a lot of modern performance cars, the GT4 question included.

The biggest surprise was the C8 — both versions.

The Stingray Blair walked away thinking is the car the average enthusiast should actually be buying as a usable, frequently-driven sports car. The boot is huge. The mid-engine architecture makes the car feel smaller from inside than it looks from outside. And the character of the car changes drastically across the drive modes — tour, sport, track — to a degree Blair hadn't expected from a Chevrolet. In tour mode it's a cruiser. In track mode it's something else entirely. He gets why these are on every other corner.

The Z06 is what reset his worldview.

The motor is genuinely insane — 670 horsepower, naturally aspirated, flat-plane crank, revving to nearly 9,000 rpm. Find another NA motor doing that, Shinoo asked, coming from an American car company. The other thing Blair didn't expect was the precision. The C8 platform has introduced steering and handling precision that the C5, C6, and C7 simply did not have. For decades, comparing a Corvette to a Porsche was, in Blair's framing, cheeseburger versus pizza — different categories, hard to weigh side by side. With the C8 Z06, that framing collapses. There's a European feel to this car. The interior is genuinely better than the C7 by a wide margin. You can have it as a targa convertible. You can soften it into a comfortable tour-mode cruiser when you don't want a race car.

Comfort, Blair realized, is not the same as boring. He'd been conflating the two for years. The C8 Z06 is comfortable and extraordinary.

He bought nothing. He told his wife about it. Spec'd a Z06 online at roughly $130K new — used examples are running closer to $100K. He's not done thinking about it.

Blair has been openly anti-EV on this show, with his Tesla Model 3 framed as a household appliance and nothing more. So when an Audi salesman handed him the keys to an e-tron GT in a deep green with an Alcantara wheel, the expectation was that he'd dismiss it.

He didn't.

The car shares its platform with the Porsche Taycan, and Blair preferred the e-tron GT's styling. The interior felt German in the way a good Audi does — material quality, build solidity, the kind of detail that's missing from a Model 3. The instant torque was addictive without being nausea-inducing — the punch-it-and-the-car-just-moves quality that EVs do well and that Blair hadn't yet found compelling in any specific car. He spent a couple of corners on freeway on-ramps and the car handled them properly.

The one thing he couldn't get past: the lane-centering tech pinged him between lanes. A two-year-old Audi should hold a lane on the freeway long enough to glance at a phone (Blair's admission, not ours). Tesla's lead on this specific software feature is still real and still the reason Tesla buyers stay Tesla buyers. The e-tron GT is the better-built car. It's the less complete software experience.

Blair came away saying, out loud, that he'd softened on EVs as long-distance daily drivers. That's a meaningful shift from his previous position.

The rest of the lineup was the enthusiast's daily-driver shortlist.

The BMW Z3 M Roadster (S52) is the early M Roadster Blair has long had nostalgia for — and is honest about that nostalgia being most of the reason he keeps looking at them.

The GR86 is what Toyota has been quietly doing right for several years now — a clean, reliable, manual sports car at a sane price point. Worth a longer conversation on a future episode.

The ND Miata Club is, in Blair's framing, what reminds you that the answer is always Miata. Miatas don't disappoint. He doesn't fit perfectly in one and would not buy one as his only car, but as a second toy, they remain the most rationally defensible enthusiast purchase in the market.

None of these replaced his 330i. None of them replaced his M3. The original consolidation mission failed completely. But the GT4 question got real answers — because gearing is one variable in a much larger conversation about how you actually use the cars you own.

The natural follow-up: at Z06 money — call it $100K used, $130–150K new — what Porsche actually takes the fight to it?

Shinoo's pick was a build path — a 997.1 or 997.2 Carrera, or an original Cayman, bought used and properly built up with the best wheels, brakes, and suspension. The aftermarket for these cars is deep. The bones are right. A well-built 997 can give a Z06 a real fight, even if Shinoo concedes the Z06 still spanks it.

Blair's pick was the 991.1 GT3. The 2014–2016 PDK-only car. The reason the prices have settled at roughly $130K–$160K is the well-documented engine failure issue on that generation — and the move is to find one that's already had the G-series engine replacement done. A buddy of Blair's recently did exactly that, paid about $140K, has the reliable motor, and has a track-day-legitimate GT3. The runner-up: a 718 Spider in manual or PDK, around $130K–$140K, with another $10K to swap the gear ratios two through four for the shorter set Blair has been agitating for all season.

The consensus when Shinoo had to actually choose between Z06 and the right Porsche: the 991.1 GT3 is the right Porsche for the fight. Blair concedes it's the right Porsche answer. But he's keeping the Z06.

Which led to the deeper take Blair landed on, and which will offend some readers: at Z06 money, the 911 Turbo is no longer the obvious play. Same neighborhood of money, dramatically different experience, and the C8 Z06 wins it on engagement and character for him. The cheeseburger-versus-pizza framing the two brands have lived under for years doesn't hold up against the C8.

Shinoo's parting observation, with affection: Blair now likes EVs. Doesn't mind automatic transmissions. And just argued that 911 Turbos are pointless. Three positions Blair would not have endorsed a year ago. The real Blair, apparently. He's going to hide.

The other thing the Instagram comments surfaced is that the people doing the commenting aren't all doing the same hobby. Blair sketched out ten enthusiast types on the show, which is worth running through here:

Shinoo identifies as the driver, the builder, the racer, and the experience chaser. Blair admits to a strong nostalgist streak — which is why his garage still has an E46 M3 he says he should sell and keeps not selling. None of these are wrong. They're just different lanes of the same hobby.

The reason to surface this: a comment that reads as an attack on your car is usually an enthusiast in a different lane wondering why you're in theirs.

Dodge announced the Copperhead this week and coined a new category for it: hyper muscle car. Front-engine, almost certainly rear-wheel drive, explicitly not a C8 competitor, and explicitly not a Viper replacement. Shinoo's read: with the hypercar market saturated with sports-car-focused machines, Dodge committing to a muscle-car-specific halo is the strategically right move. And the car looks great.

Audi unveiled a halo car called the Nuvolari — named after Tazio Nuvolari, the legendary pre-war Italian racing driver. Production capped at 499 units. Hybrid V8 revving to 10,000 rpm. Platform shared with the new Lamborghini Temerario. The design language borrows from the Audi TT concept shown a few months back — sharp, futuristic, simplified, distinctly Audi. The high rear deck echoes the Lotus Theory One and the original Lamborghini Diablo. It's machine-like and industrial, the Audi ethos at full strength, and it's the kind of fresh-but-not-retro design language the segment has been missing.

The 420 spec drop continued this week, and the headline upgrade is the suspension. The 420 will run Multimatic DSSV (spool valve) dampers — the same genuinely high-end damper family found on the Ferrari Purosangue, the Ford GT, and 911 Cup cars. Not the more conventional shim-stack shocks Multimatic also makes. The R&D cost to develop a DSSV set for a specific car application is roughly $150K, which is why DSSV is rare.

The full options list also landed: a maxed-out 420 lands at about $170K. Most of the option boxes are cosmetic. The one box that actually matters, per Shinoo, is the $12K handling package — that's the box that gets you the DSSV dampers, the titanium exhaust, and possibly a lighter battery. Tick that one. Skip the rest.

A proposed regulation in California would ban DOT tires rated at 200 treadwear and below. The specific products named in the bill: Yokohama A052, Toyo R888R, Bridgestone RE-71R. These are the tires the shop runs on Elises and Exiges. They're also what anyone serious about a track day on a road-legal car is running. SEMA is lobbying for a sports-car exemption. Watch the space.

Rick wrote in with a question that capped the whole episode:

Both hosts went the same way.

Shinoo's case: the cars he loves most are flawed. The Ariel Atom and the air-cooled Porsche 911 share an identical handling profile — understeer going in, oversteer coming out, weight balance entirely wrong for the lap time — and both are loved despite that, or maybe because of it. The Cindy Crawford mole. The Lauren Bacall gap-tooth. Personality is the flaw being expressive about itself. He test-drove an Acura NSX in the 1990s and walked away underwhelmed precisely because it was too good. Nothing to push against.

Blair's case: a perfectly engineered car removes the participation. The clown shoe M Coupe was odd, demanded a specific driving style, and was more memorable for it. The Mitsubishi Bravo in his driveway has nothing in common with a sports car and gets more attention than anything else he owns. The Elise is one of the more flawed proper sports cars you can buy at this price point — and it is also the car he drives the most.

The shared answer: give us the flaws. They're where the stories live.

Which is the long way of answering the gearing argument too. The 981 GT4 is one of the most engineered cars in its segment. Blair's complaint about its road gearing isn't that it's a bad car. It's that the engineering — done specifically for the racetrack, where it's vindicated every time — comes at the cost of road-driving engagement. That's a flaw. A real one. Whether you care about that flaw depends on which of the ten enthusiast lanes you live in. And whether you'd swap the gears, swap the car, or just shrug and enjoy it depends on what you want from the hobby in the first place.

For Blair, this week, the answer turned out to be: a Corvette Z06.

For Shinoo, the answer remains: a Lotus, modified, with the suspension dialed in.

For Rick, and for everyone reading this: the answer is whatever makes the next drive worth taking.

– Tim, Blair & Shinoo

🏁 The Full Throttle Talk Team
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