By Tim Harris, Blair Smith & Shinoo Mapleton · April 30, 2026

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There's a version of Tim Harris's life where he stays grounded, drives sensible cars, and doesn't sell his Puerto Rico house to fund the next Ferrari.

This is not that version.

Tim couldn't make the show this week, but he sent in a dispatch from the field that we're contractually obligated to share:

We'll get to the Elettrica's (Ferrari Luce) price tag (it's worse than you think). But first: while Tim was navigating real estate liquidity events and Ferrari allocation politics, Blair and Shinoo each spent the same weekend on opposite ends of a much older debate.

Blair drove a 992.2 GT3 home from a Singer event in Park City and got out frustrated.

Shinoo took a stock NA Miata to a canyon drive in San Diego and admitted he'd brought a knife to a gunfight.

Both had a great time. Both came back with the same realization.

Blair's weekend started at Warehouse, a high-end car storage facility in Park City — the kind of place that hosts ticketed cars-and-coffee events featuring Singers — and ended with him in the passenger seat of his buddy's red, winged 992.2 GT3, getting handed the keys for the hour-long drive back to Salt Lake.

This is, on paper, a dream scenario. The car is one of the best rear-engined sports cars Porsche has ever built. The road back from Park City threads through a fast canyon, opens up onto freeway, and finishes with twenty minutes of city work. Conditions: perfect.

He got out at the end frustrated.

The math kept going wrong on him. Every time he glanced at the speedometer, he was already at 84 in a 70 zone, and the car still felt like it was loafing along on the bottom third of its capability. To actually use the GT3 — to let it do the things it was built for — would have required either a track or a federal indictment.

Shinoo's weekend was the inverse. Saturday with the Porsche Club through one of his favorite roads — going slowly, in his backup Miata, having a genuinely good time. Then Sunday with a San Diego enthusiast group, ending at Garage 79 for their fifth anniversary. The group split into a fast pack and a not-so-fast pack. Shinoo joined the slower one.

It still wasn't slow.

Bone-stock NA Miata. 500-treadwear tires. Locked the brakes once. A guy in an E28 M5 pulled alongside to let him know smoke was coming off them. Loved every minute of it. Came home thinking he wouldn't bring the Miata to that group again.

So the GT3 driver wished he'd been in the Miata. The Miata driver wished he'd been in something faster. What's actually going on?

Shinoo's framing: NVH — noise, vibration, harshness — has become an arms race the OEMs have been winning for decades. Modern cars are quieter, smoother, and more isolated than anything that came before. Add to that another layer of insulation most people don't think about: the electronics that keep you out of the ditch. ABS, stability control, torque vectoring, brake-based limited-slip diffs. All of it sits between you and the car. All of it sits between you and the experience.

The result is what Blair has been arguing for years: modern fast cars start to feel like video games. Not because they're bad — the GT3 is extraordinary — but because the sensation of speed has been engineered out of the bottom 70% of the rev range. To find the experience, you have to push hard enough that you're either at a track or in handcuffs.

There's a counter-example, and Blair drove it the same week.

The Lotus Elise S2 (with the 111R/111RS-spec engine) has roughly the same power-to-weight ratio as a 718 Cayman GT4. Doing 84 mph in the Elise feels like genuine work — the engine's near 7,000 RPM, you're hearing the gear whine, you're feeling the road through the steering column. Doing 84 mph in the GT3, Blair was bored.

The question isn't which car is better. The question is which kind of involvement you're after — and whether you've matched the car to the road you actually drive.

Motor1 ran a piece a few weeks back titled "We asked every automaker how many customers went for manual transmissions in 2025." It's the kind of data point that confirms what enthusiasts have been saying — but the breakdown by model is where it gets interesting.

The headline numbers, where a manual was even available:

Porsche 718 (before discontinuation): 46% manual. Porsche 911 Carrera T: 83%. Porsche 911 GT3 (winged): 53%. Porsche 911 GT3 Touring: 83%. Cadillac CT4-V Blackwing: 61%. Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing: 48%. BMW M2: 40%. BMW M3: 50%. Subaru BRZ: 90%. Toyota GR86, GR Supra, BMW Z4: roughly 50% across the board for manual-eligible variants.

The split that jumps out is the GT3 number. 53% manual when you tick the wing box. 83% manual on the Touring. Same engine, same chassis, dramatically different buyer behavior.

Shinoo's read: that gap is a use-case fingerprint. The winged GT3 is bought by people who track. People who track care about lap times. People who care about lap times — even amateur HPDE drivers — eventually figure out that PDK is faster. Period. Formula 1 settled this argument decades ago.

The GT3 Touring, on the other hand, is overwhelmingly a road car. The buyers have already decided they're not chasing instructor lap times. They want to heel-and-toe their way through a canyon on a Sunday morning and feel like they earned the corner exit. The CT4-V Blackwing's 61% manual rate suggests the same thing — those cars aren't being bought as track-day specials. They're being bought as fast street cars by people who like shifting.

It's the cleanest data argument we've seen for what most of us already know: when buyers actually have the choice, and the use case is the road, they pick the manual. Overwhelmingly. The only place manuals are losing decisively is the racetrack — and that's a battle most enthusiasts gave up on years ago.

Time for opinions. We tried to stay polite. We mostly failed.

The E90 M3 — the V8, four-door, manual sedan — was, in Shinoo's read, the pinnacle of what BMW does best: not sports cars, but sports sedans. Practical, communicative, high-revving, available with three pedals and four doors.

Everything since has gotten heavier, more complicated, and less interesting. The G80 doesn't move him. The F80 didn't either. He sees the engineering. He just doesn't want one.

A friend left Blair a GT-R for a full week with explicit instructions to drive it. He drove it once — to pick his daughter up from dance class.

The car, by every objective measure, is a legend. Holds value. Aging well visually. Worshipped on the internet. But getting in it felt to Blair like getting into a Tesla Model S: big, heavy, fast in a way that requires you to be foot-down all the time, with an exhaust note he generously described as "vacuum cleaner."

He's not anti-JDM. He has a kei van in the garage. He loves Miatas. The R35 just never landed for him.

He went big with this one.

Every 996 Turbo he's driven: disappointing. The 991.2 he evaluated? Throttle response felt like there was a small committee of computers deciding whether to comply with his right foot. Beautiful 10,000-mile Mauritius Blue 930 Turbo? Iconic to look at, didn't move him.

The exception that proves the rule: a 1977 pre-intercooler 3.0L 930 hot rod with straight pipes and a big turbo. That one was alive. Loud, raucous, beautiful. The Sport Classic he drove was also more interesting than expected.

His take, distilled: the modern 911 Turbo has been engineered into the role of a refined GT car — a Lear jet for the road, very fast, very competent, emotionally muted. The GT3 line picked up the sporty mantle, and the Turbo lineage drifted into the orbit of "alternative to a Lexus." Excellent at what it does. Just not what he wants from a 911.

This one is going to start fights.

Shinoo's gripe is partly visual — the way the early Targa roof line interrupts the silhouette, breaks the sweep, and turns the side profile into something he just doesn't enjoy looking at. It's also partly structural: cowl shake, less rigidity, less precision when you actually push the car.

He prefers the later 996/997-era Targa execution, where the larger glass section preserves the coupe's roofline.

Blair: complete disagreement. Memories of his old 85 Carrera coupe and his buddy's matching Targa point him the other way — the open roof on the right canyon road, on the right morning, is exactly the experience an air-cooled 911 was made to deliver.

If you think we're wrong, the comments are right there.

Tim's letter wasn't a bit. The base Elettrica price has been announced, and at $647,000 USD, it is now the most expensive series-production Ferrari ever offered.

The Acquired podcast did a deep-dive episode on Ferrari that's worth a listen — three or four hours, but the financial picture is the part to absorb. Ferrari's gross margins are roughly 3–4x what every other automaker pulls. The company isn't competing with Porsche or McLaren anymore. It's competing with Hermès. The price is the positioning.

The buyer, by Ferrari's own implicit math: a billionaire in a city center where ICE is increasingly restricted — London, Paris, Milan, Singapore — who wants to seat four full-size adults, doesn't blink at the sticker, and views the Jony Ive-designed interior the way Hermès clients view a Birkin. Allocation, not affordability, is the constraint.

The depreciation question is the more interesting one. A Ferrari 296 GTB — by all accounts a genuinely good car — recently surfaced at auction with sub-1,000 miles on it for nearly $100K below its ~$480K MSRP. If a brand-new V6 hybrid is taking that hit, what happens to a $750K-as-spec'd EV in a market that has demonstrated, repeatedly, that it does not want to pay used-EV prices?

Ferrari's answer, presumably: doesn't matter. Restrict supply, sell every one to the allocation list, and let the secondary market sort itself out. Watch this space.

Morgan announced their new flagship this week. £112,000 (roughly $145K). BMW's B58 turbocharged inline-six — the same engine you'll find in a current Toyota Supra and an M340i. Eight-speed automatic. 180 mph claimed top speed.

The pitch is younger buyers and modern emissions compliance, wrapped in the wood-chassis, retro-British silhouette Morgan has built its identity around for a century. Whether the B58 — a great motor, no argument — sounds right in a Morgan is the open question. Turbocharged sixes generally fare better than turbocharged fours when sound matters, but Morgans have historically traded on character, not horsepower numbers.

We'll reserve judgment until somebody puts one in front of us. The performance figures are honest. The aesthetic, as always with Morgan, is its own argument.

Dave wrote in this week with a question that fits the rest of the episode like a glove:

"Is the manual transmission actually better, or is it just more romantic?"

The honest answer: it depends on what you're optimizing for.

On a racetrack, where lap times are the metric, paddle-shift is faster. Period. Formula 1 settled this in the early '90s and never looked back. Even at the amateur HPDE level, once you start logging data, the conclusion is the same.

In daily traffic — particularly in dense, congested cities like Los Angeles — a manual is mostly a punishment. There's a reason most BMWs sitting on most BMW dealership lots in Southern California are equipped with automatics. The clutch leg gives up before the romance does.

But on the right road, in the right car, with weight transferring through a downhill compression and a corner opening up — the act of nailing a heel-and-toe downshift, getting the engine matched perfectly to the road speed, finishing the brake release just as you feed the throttle back in — that's not faster. That's just better. In the way that things are better when you're the one doing them, not when something else is doing them for you.

So: more romantic? Probably yes.

Worth it? Also yes.

🎙 Listen to the full episode here: https://youtu.be/JGnnhw4We44?si=OW8vBo0MbsQfUmjl

– Tim, Blair & Shinoo

🏁 The Full Throttle Talk Team
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