Lando Norris didn’t need to be behind the wheel of a McLaren to get noticed in Monte Carlo this week. Carspotters caught the papaya-liveried Formula 1 driver cruising through Monaco’s tight streets in his personal Porsche 911 GT3 RS, the same dark green coupe that’s become a recurring fixture around the principality. For someone who spends race weekends piloting a car that costs more than most houses, choosing one of Porsche’s most track-obsessed road cars for a Tuesday errand run isn’t exactly a quiet choice, but at this point, nobody expects quiet from Norris’s garage.
This isn’t a new car, either. Backfire News first caught Norris debuting the Porsche in Monte Carlo back in the spring of 2025, ahead of that year’s Monaco Grand Prix weekend, an event that turns the entire principality into a logistics puzzle unlike anywhere else on the F1 calendar. More than a year later, the Porsche is still very much in rotation, and the local spotter accounts treat every reappearance like clockwork.
What makes the choice interesting is how mismatched the car is with the environment. Porsche didn’t engineer the GT3 RS to idle past yacht-lined harbors. Its swan-neck-mounted rear wing and adjustable aero package are built to produce up to 1,895 pounds of downforce at top speed, a figure Porsche’s own engineers highlighted at launch as nearly double what the standard GT3 generates. That’s more downforce than some actual race cars manage, wrapped around a car that still has to pass a highway safety inspection. It’s a setup that makes total sense at 150 mph on a back straight and considerably less sense weaving around Monaco’s roundabouts at 20 mph with a curb waiting at every apex.
The engine underneath all that aero is a 4.0-liter naturally aspirated flat-six making 518 horsepower, enough for a 0-60 run in the low three-second range according to Porsche’s own figures. There’s no turbo lag to manage and no hybrid system to lean on for low-speed torque, just a high-strung six that wants to be revved out, not lugged along in first gear behind a tour bus full of cruise ship passengers.
That contradiction between purpose and use is part of what makes GT3 RS ownership its own kind of statement. Porsche’s own dealer network currently has a certified pre-owned 2025 example listed at $599,995, a number that says plenty about how badly people want a car most owners will never actually take to a track. Allocations remain notoriously tight, and Porsche has spent years rewarding loyal, high-spending buyers with first access to RS builds before anyone else gets a shot. Norris’s F1 paycheck didn’t exempt him from that line.
Driving something worth that much through a city built on cobblestones, valet stands, and a permanent audience of camera phones carries its own kind of risk beyond curb rash. Insurers who write policies on six-figure exotics typically require agreed-value coverage rather than standard depreciation-based terms, precisely because a car like this can be worth wildly different amounts depending on mileage, options, and how much the next buyer wants it. Parking one on a public street also means accepting a level of exposure most owners try to avoid; Backfire News has covered plenty of exotics that didn’t fare so well once they left the garage, including a stolen 911 that turned up gutted for parts and a different GT3 RS that came uncomfortably close to ending up at the bottom of a canal.
Norris isn’t the only grid regular treating Monaco like a rotating car show, either. Fernando Alonso has been spotted there in everything from a LaFerrari to a one-of-38 Aston Martin Valiant, and Norris’s own collection has already made local headlines before, from his Lamborghini Miura stalling out in Monte Carlo traffic to the time he gave teammate Oscar Piastri a spin around Silverstone in his McLaren P1. None of it has much to do with sponsorship obligations. It’s simply what happens when a driver’s income outpaces the actual racing calendar, and the cars start doing the talking during the weeks nobody’s at the track.
It helps that Monaco practically hands its drivers a highlight reel for free. The same low speed limits that frustrate performance-car owners the rest of the year make a slow cruise in a race-bred Porsche look effortless on camera, tight turns and all. Whether Norris does it for the spotters, for himself, or just because it happened to be the car in the garage that morning, the GT3 RS keeps proving it doesn’t need an actual track to draw a crowd.
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