In 2007, a salesman walking a customer through a Cayenne GTS order form would have worked down it roughly in order of margin – air suspension, sunroof, sports seats, navigation. Somewhere further down, listed without ceremony and at no cost, was a six-speed manual gearbox. It was there because Porsche’s engineers thought the car deserved one, and because somebody in Stuttgart still believed a Porsche buyer might want to change gear himself. Almost none of them did. Only a handful C16 RHD cars left the factory with three pedals. Porsche facelifted the first-generation Cayenne and found a gap in the middle of the range. The S was the sensible one; the Turbo was the fast one. What was missing was the car Porsche had always been best at building – the one that gives up a little outright pace in return for everything else. So they took the Turbo’s wide body and its stance, dropped the ride height onto stiffer steel springs, fitted a larger intake manifold to the 4.8-litre V8 to find another twenty horsepower over the S, shortened the final drive, added a sports exhaust with four pipes and did all of it without a turbocharger anywhere in sight. 405PS, arriving right at the top, where naturally aspirated engines make you go and look for it. It was the first time those three letters had been applied to something that was not a sports car, and the formula has not changed since. Never the fastest car in the range. Always the one to drive. The gearbox alters the character more than the specification suggests. Every other V8 Cayenne of the period used a six-speed Aisin automatic shared with the Touareg and the Q7. A naturally aspirated 4.8 gives its best at the top, and a torque converter spends its life quietly taking those revs away from you. The manual hands the decision back. It also removes a great deal between the driver and the engine. No torque converter, no adaptive shift programme forming its own opinion halfway through a corner; a clutch, a lever, and six ratios shortened to suit the V8. It is the simplest part of the car, and twenty years on, the part least likely to ask anything of you. By the time of the facelift the manual had gone from the S altogether. The GTS was the only V8 Cayenne you could still have with three pedals, and it is the only one Porsche ever built that way. Finished in GTS Red, the first shade in the company’s history created specifically for a GTS model. and withdrawn when the 957 Cayenne ended; and it was some years before Porsche brought it back, this time as a Paint to Sample option on the 911, where it is a five-figure decision rather than a free one. Inside is the other half of the GTS signature, and the beginning of a convention. Black leather across the surfaces that have to wear well, Alcantara everywhere the driver actually makes contact. Porsche has applied the same logic to every GTS it has built since, renaming the material Race-Tex along the way, but the thinking is unchanged: grip where it matters, hide for the rest. Against the red paint it reads exactly as intended, which is to say soberly. No air suspension and no sunroof. In 2008 that would have looked like thrift. Twenty years later it looks like foresight, because those are the two systems where first-generation Cayennes tend to empty their owners’ pockets — struts that perish, compressors that give up, roof drains that block and frames that seize. This one has neither. It sits instead on the steel sports chassis Porsche engineered the GTS around in the first place, beneath a solid roof that is stiffer and taller inside. Whether it was arrived at by judgement or by economy, it is the specification to own now. It is not an austere car. BOSE surround sound was fitted from new, and in the centre console sits a Porsche Classic Communication Management Plus unit – Porsche’s own factory-built head unit, with a seven-inch touchscreen, Apple CarPlay, DAB and navigation, designed by Porsche Classic to look as though it had always been there. Worth knowing: Porsche certified the system only for first-generation Cayennes built up to the 2008 model year. Later 957s cannot have it. This one can, and does. Then there is the business of actually using it. Set a GTS against the SUVs sold alongside it – the X5 4.8is, the ML 63, the supercharged Range Rover Sport – and the difference was never outright pace. It was that Porsche could not afford for its SUV to feel like an apology to a customer who might be buying a 911 next, so the Cayenne was given steering, damping and body control belonging to an altogether different class of car. Period testers recorded 0.90g of lateral grip, which is sports car territory, from something rated to tow three and a half tonnes. Which is why it makes such sense here in particular. British roads are not the Route Napoléon. They are narrow, wet, ridged, patched and increasingly broken, and a low two-seater spends much of its life listening for its own underside. A GTS ignores all of that – ground clearance to spare, damping that works on a poor surface, a V8 that only becomes interesting past four thousand revs, and six gears to find for yourself. It is a B-road car that happens to seat five. The market has begun to notice. L322 Range Rovers spent a decade being run into the ground before they were reappraised as the last of something, and first-generation Cayennes have reached that point now. The manual GTS got there first: in March, a thirty-four-thousand-mile car sold at auction in America for $97,500; rather more than it had cost new. Which brings it to this one. Thirteen stamps in the book and since arriving with us it has had a full inspection, a new clutch and dual-mass flywheel in genuine Porsche parts, new front suspension arms and a full service. On the button and ready to be enjoyed.