Porsche 718 Cayman engines & performance

Turbocharging has not suddenly made the car wheezy, slow, anonymous or unlikeable.

For anyone fearing a four-cylinder implant of total featurelessness, rest assured: the coupé has not succumbed.

The move to four horizontally opposed cylinders instead of six comes as part of a mid-life facelift that leaves many of the Cayman’s hard points unaltered

Matt Saunders

Road test editor

Objectively, it is in several ways better than what has gone before. Not least of these is the straight-line speed of the S model.

Our test car’s mix of a manual gearbox, a limiter on available revs for a standing start and the same slightly frail-feeling clutch we encountered on the Porsche 718 Boxster amounts to a car that you can’t launch away from the line particularly venomously.

Even so, the coupé managed 60mph in 4.8sec when two-up. That’s short of Porsche’s claim, but just 0.2sec behind the 3.8-litre 380bhp run-out Cayman GT4.

More winsome still is the in-gear performance. The previous Cayman’s naturally aspirated indifference to an open throttle at middling revs has been eradicated. So much so that from 60mph to 80mph in sixth, the S proved 1.3sec quicker than the GT4, thanks to the much earlier arrival of the same 310lb ft of peak twist.

This makes the 718 by far the most amenable Cayman yet to drive on a motorway. More than that, though, it furnishes the car with a new-found thrusting eagerness in the lower ratios, making it a fantastically fast, ever-ready real-world prospect in the way the outgoing version was not.