My Porsche 911 Carrera GTS is a quick car, and the traffic behind made me glad

I’ve seen some incongruous sights in my rear-view mirror before but this is a new one: a grid of Porsche Carrera Cup race cars, elevated on their pneumatic stands as teams gamble whether to fit wet or dry tyres beneath angry clouds at Donington Park.

evo’s 911 Carrera GTS road car is idling patiently, ready to lead the formation lap for the opening round of the Carrera Cup championship. It’ll be my job to drive a safe distance ahead of the safety car, show our 911 off on camera, and try not to stick it in the gravel trap live on ITV4.

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Great Britain’s Carrera Cup is the high-pressure proving ground for aspiring young drivers to make their mark and potentially springboard to an illustrious career: many Carrera alumni have gone on to glittering success in endurance racing, GTs, touring cars and beyond.

There are multiple Carrera Cup championships around the world, all using identical 911 GT3 Cup racing cars. As we discovered when we track-tested the GT3 Cup at Estoril in issue 319, it’s an incredible bit of kit: savagely fast, capable of serious cornering speeds, and a well-sorted but challenging car to extract the maximum from. It’s built around the same bodyshell as our long-termer and goes down the same production line at Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen, although it packs a howling 4-litre naturally aspirated engine related to the 911 GT3 road car’s rather than the 3.8-litre twin-turbo unit in the back of our car.

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Every two years, Porsche selects a driver aged between 16 and 24 for its hotly contested Junior scholarship programme. The 2024-25 Junior was James Wallis. He’s calm and collected when we speak to him ahead of the race. ‘About 70 drivers entered their CV; 12 were selected for an interview and four for a shoot-out at Silverstone,’ he explains. ‘I’m still doing my A-levels, so I used my headmaster for interview practice. This year it’s going to be hard to stand out but I want the race to be wet: it was tipping it down on the day of the shoot-out…’

Illustrating just how fiercely competitive the Cup is, the top 14 drivers in qualifying are covered by only four-tenths of a second. Our 911 GTS gets a head start for the pace lap and feels right at home at Donington with its dampers in Sport mode (and sounds pretty good with the exhaust set to Sport, too). I’m paranoid about getting in the way of the safety car and the 22 angry Cup cars weaving behind it, so I canter around the track at a brisk-ish pace. As I peel off into the pitlane at the end of the lap, the sound of furious flat cylinders screams into action in the background, and I pad back through the paddock in the 911 to Porsche’s race village complex to watch the action on the screens. It’s as eventful as you’d expect, with battles throughout the field and a couple of scary-looking crashes. The race is won by William Martin, with Wallis 7th from 11th on the grid (he was 0.26sec off pole).

There are larger footnotes in motorsport history, but (briefly) leading the pack for this race was a fun one to make.

This story was first featured in evo issue 323.

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