Twin Test: Porsche 911 GTS v Mercedes-AMG GT55

This is the kind of encounter you’d expect a Porsche 911 barely to notice. One to sweep aside as you might a frond of bracken on a country walk. Yes the Benz has a big V8 in it and looks quite cool, but we all know how this particular Stuttgart derby ends up. And it’s with a three-pointed star looking somewhat careworn if not necessarily flat on its face in the mud.

But hold on. Those who read my account of spending a month with this very Mercedes-AMG GT55 would be forgiven for wondering just how willing it might be to prostrate itself at the first sound of a flat-six sabre-rattling its way across a Welsh mountain road.

Put it this way, and if you might indulge my joyous mélange of metaphors one last time, at Ti we are not in the lamb to the slaughter trade and if I really didn’t think the big Benz had a chance of giving a good account of itself against one of Porsche’s finest, you’d not be reading these words now.