This delightful new Porsche 911 GT3 honours Britain's very first Porsche

On the surface, this is but another special edition Porsche 911, built to commemorate something or other, offering a special new bespoke colourway applied to one half of a single doorhandle, limited to 3.5 cars and yours for £infinity.

But dig deeper, and… OK fine, it’s another special edition Porsche 911. But this one’s a GT3 Touring. In green. With a beige interior and a wooden gearknob. It’s got back seats, a fabulous naturally aspirated flat six and details for days.

Welcome to the [deep breath] Porsche 911 GT3 Earls Court 51, built to honour 75 years since the very first Porsche was shown at London’s Earls Court, back in – that’s right! – 1951. That car was a 356. In green.

Hence why this one’s green. And not just any green, but colour matched to that original 356 and with added aluminium flecks “to catch and reflect the light”. There’s a bonnet strip, high gloss calipers, badges, LED door projectors, and an ‘Exclusive Design’ fuel filler.

Porsche opted to exploit the new GT3 Touring’s back seat option – to better “mimic the interior design of the original 356” – and went about filling the interior with much leather, corduroy, special stitching, and wood veneer. Including on the gearstick.

There are yet more hat tips to the 356: an embossed silhouette of the gorgeous old timer when you open the driver’s door along with the cringey tagline ‘driving in its purest form’, Union Jack motifs on the sun visors, and ‘Earls Court 51’ etched onto the headrest.

A headrest thine head will likely be snapped back onto fairly regularly, because at heart this is a GT3, so that’s a 4.0-litre sixer with 503bhp and one of the finest driving experiences money can buy. You’ve likely read the Top Gear verdict on the 992.2 GT3 (including the Touring), but in short: it great.

Each Earls Court 51 car will come with a nice, dandy new Porsche watch, a 1:18 model, and a weekend bag. Plus, a big heavy book charting the car’s development that you can strategically place on your coffee table, or use to boost its wonky leg.

Speaking of boosts, Porsche has also restored a classic 356 (see below) to the spec of the 1951 Earls Court cars using info gleaned from the those cars’ chassis numbers. It’s taken two years to get to this stage, and amazingly still features the original 1.1-litre 36bhp flat four and running gear.

Probably priceless, that car, but these new GT3 Tourings aren’t. Each one starts at… not quite £infinity but close: a whopping £251,951, with only 51 units planned. That’s a quarter of a million quid for a car that as standard starts from £158,200.