SPY PICS: Porsche Cayman GT4

Porsche’s latest weapon has been spied, and our sources at Automedia have confirmed it will be called the Cayman GT4.

Sporting the sort of equipment that might tickle the fancy of some 911 customers, the new model will be a hardcore, track-ready razor-edged sports car designed to top the time sheets at track days.

Expected to keep straight-line pace with the $220,000 supercharged Jaguar F-Type R Coupe, the new Cayman GT4 will be the most powerful and expensive entry-level coupe from Porsche.

It is understood that Porsche didn't want to call it a Cayman GT3 because that name is reserved exclusively for the 911. 

As the photos of the almost completely undisguised car reveal, Porsche has equipped the radical new Cayman with low-riding sports suspension, dinner plate-sized brake rotors, an aggressive rear wing, ground-hugging body work and what appear to be semi-slick tyres wrapped around large 20-inch racing rims.

The idea is clearly to make the quickest Porsche Cayman yet.

Porsche’s Cayman GT4 will eclipse the current range-topping Cayman GTS, which was first seen at the 2014 Beijing motor show in China last month and will be offered in Australia from August 2014 priced at $161,400.

The Cayman GTS is powered by a 3.4-litre flat six-cylinder petrol engine, worth 250kW, propelling the car from 0-100km/h in 4.6 seconds. Not slow.

You can read a review of Cayman GTS in coming days, as motoring.com.au attends the international launch, but these spy photos confirm that Porsche wants something even more potent.

There’s no question the new model is being designed to take Cayman performance to the next level, likely to be 300kW of power, a 50kW hike over the GTS. But the burning question is this: what will provide the extra mumbo?

The Automedia spy photographers who snapped these photos reckon it could be powered by a hybrid powerplant, with talk of a brand-new four-cylinder engine hooked up to an electric motor, a la Mark Webber’s 919 Hybrid Le Mans race car.

Our Porsche sources scotched the hybrid talk, calling it 'preposterous' and hinted the new model would simply take a high-output version of the Cayman GTS's 3.4-litre six-cylinder engine.

It's also unlikely we'll see a Boxster GT4.

Based on the almost production-ready spy pics, we could see the Cayman GT4 launched later in the year, or early 2015.

-- with Automedia