THE FIRST GTS

The GTS badge wasn’t entirely unfamiliar when Porsche first affixed it to the 911 Carrera’s rump in 2010, nearing the end of 997-generation production. The 904 prototype racer that won the 1964 Targa Florio wore the same initials, and they later found their way onto everything from the four-cylinder 924 to the eight-cylinder 928 and, shortly before the 997, the Cayenne GTS.

But when the 911 Carrera 2 GTS arrived in December 2010, it helped bridge the gap between the Carrera S and GT3, and gave the Carrera a three-tier model range for the first time. Its success helped pave the way for the GTS sub-brand to not only remain a staple of the 911 range to this day – though it’s yet to be introduced for the new 992 – but to be rolled out across Porsche’s other models too.

To get some perspective almost a decade on, we’ve come to specialists Paragon in Five Ashes to test a near box-fresh Carrera 4 GTS, the all-wheel-drive version announced in May 2011.

A core part of the GTS’s appeal always seemed to lie