Go, speed racer, go: Lotus, Porsche will have pulses racing

One is British, the other German. The Brit is a 1-ton, mid-engine atomic pixie stripped to the bare metal floor, a car so loud and raw that when its 220-horsepower supercharged four is at -- how to put this delicately? -- full suck, it sounds like an Oreck vacuum cleaner has taken up residence in your helmet. The German is almost exactly a half-ton heavier, a winged, ground-skimming vampire with a 415-hp, 3.6-liter flat six stuck in its keister. The sound of this engine is breathtaking, biblical, deeply sinister, like a two-man logging team cutting down the Tree of Knowledge.

If you think "low polar moment" has to do with melting ice caps, these cars are not for you. These cars are turnkey club racers, factory-prepped competition cars that you can drive to the track, hot lap and drive home on what's left of the tires. They are toys, although in general lethality, more in line with those made by General Dynamics than Mattel.

These cars -- the Lotus Exige S and the Porsche 911 GT3 -- belong to an esoteric subset of performance cars: stripped down, tweaked to the gills, barely legal. You could count among them the Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera and the Ferrari F430 Challenge Stradale. How barely legal? The Exige S has a rear-view mirror -- for purposes of Department of Transportation approval -- but you can't see anything because the rear canopy is filled with the enormous intercooler.

Road cars are compromised. The steering is slower, more assisted and more self-centering. The springs and shocks are softer. The cabins are packed with heavy, noise-dampening insulation.

In the Exige S and the GT3, all that gets tossed like Imus Fan Club buttons. The Porsche has a stall-happy, dual-mass flywheel and a towering, leg-wearying pedal to engage it. Getting into the tiny, low-slung Lotus is like climbing into a desk drawer. Both cars have hair-trigger steering. A good sneeze can send you across three lanes of traffic.

These cars remind me of an O. Henry short story that was never written: A man, seeking revenge, gives his mortal enemy a gift of one of these cars -- free, no questions asked. The only condition: He has to pick it up in Baltimore and drive it home. On second thought, it's more like Stephen King.

But at the track? They're bliss, perfection, automotive Orgasmatrons.

The $60,815 (base price) Exige S -- the new supercharged version replacing the soft-on-power Exige -- is an elementary particle in sports-car physics: No power steering, no stability control and no adaptive damping to sooth the cat-o'-nine-tails sting of its suspension. The $106,860 GT3 -- a lightened and tightened version of the 997 with the naturally aspirated engine set to kill -- is more sophisticated: It has variable-rate power steering, traction control and adaptive damping. But what the Porsche giveth in terms of civility -- alcantara seats and optional DVD-based navigation, for instance -- it taketh away in protective overrides. Unlike standard 911s, the GT3 doesn't come with stability control; tease this rear-engine dragon's sliding, opposite-lock limits and you may find yourself going backward in a major hurry.

You could not ask for two unalike cars to be more alike. For example, both lunge -- and that's the only word for it -- to 60 mph in about 4 seconds. Both scream red-faced arias up to 8,500 rpm, and both reach peak torque at 5,500 rpm. Both use hand-stirred gear sets -- in fact, these are two of the quickest production cars in the world that still use a conventional six-speed manual gearbox (another is the Porsche Turbo). Both come shod with race tires (Yokohama ADVAN A048s for the Lotus, Michelin Pilot Sport Cups for the Porsche) that are stickier than a House subpoena. Both have adjustable suspensions: The Lotus has one-way adjustable Eibach/Bilstein coil-overs and rear anti-roll bar, while the GT3's whole geometry can be tuned (camber, toe, ride height and roll stiffness). Both have race-proven brakes: Brembos for the Lotus and, on our test GT3, Porsche's full-on land anchors, the optional ceramic composite brakes.

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