Grab your helmet: the Porsche Cayman GT4 Clubsport is coming

We love the Porsche Cayman GT4. There’s really not an area that needs vital improvement, save for the fact the loose change at the back of our collective sofas falls comfortably short of the £65,000 or so we’d need to buy one.

Porsche has had a good go, though, today confirming the Cayman GT4 Clubsport will enter production. It’s a racing version of the GT4, strictly not road-legal and with weight cut to 1,300kg (a 40kg drop) despite the addition of a PDK twin-clutch gearbox.

Yup. The GT4 road car (pictured above, at TG's Speed Week) is rightly lauded for sticking with an old-school yet mechanically precise manual transmission, yet the motorsport variant gets a paddle-shifting auto. Make sense, though: PDK equals quicker lap times, less chance of wrecking a gearbox while chasing apices, hands on the wheel more of the time.

Being a racer, there’s a full rollcage inside, while elements of the GT4 Clubsport's suspension are taken from the more senior 911 GT3 Cup. Steel brakes are fitted all round – carbon-ceramics would be rather expensive to keep on top of – while there’s just the one seat, which comes fitted with a six-point harness.

Perhaps the only mild disappointment is that the 380bhp flat-six engine remains untouched, with no power upgrade. But given it’s a glorious engine as is, that’s hair-splitting at its most scrupulous.

Designed to race in Porsche club events and various American sports car series, the GT4 Clubsport is, says Porsche, aimed at ‘motorsport newcomers’.

No word on pricing yet – expect a sizeable premium over the £64,451 a road-going GT4 starts at – while we won’t know exactly what the Clubsport looks like until it makes its Los Angeles motor show debut next month. We’re hoping for a wing. A rather large one…