It's one of those simple questions that can lead to a whole night's worth of discussion at a bar, in the pits of an endurance race, or on an Internet forum: Should the "enthusiast version" of a car be cheaper than the standard version, or should it cost more? In one corner, you've got the people who think that more is always better. Call them the ZR1 crowd, after the old first-generation King of the Hill Vette that basically represented a high-buck rework of the C4 Corvette. Yeah, they want more. More power. More tire. More exotic materials. Limited production numbers. Sticker prices that guarantee exclusivity.

Then you have the people who think that, when it comes to enthusiast cars, less is more. I'm one of them, most of the time. Less weight, less equipment, but especially less money. Our patron saint is Max Hoffman, who came up with the idea of the Porsche 356 Speedster, thus doing more with less. We preferred the '89 Civic Si to the Prelude 4WS, the Sentra SE-R to the NX2000, the '93 911 RS America to the Turbo 3.6. A surprising number of us, when pressed, will admit that some of the best times of our driving lives happened behind the wheel of Fox-body Mustangs or four-cylinder Japanese minitrucks.

Much of the spotlight at this week's Geneva show fell on the Corvette Grand Sport and the Porsche 911 R. At first blush, they're both aimed at the less-is-more crowd. The Grand Sport combines much of the Z06 chassis wizardry with the naturally aspirated V8 from the base Stingray, while the 911 R puts a GT3 RS-spec engine and a six-speed manual in a plain-Jane wingless body. The difference, and the devil, is in the details.

As brilliant, and popular, as the C6-generation Grand Sport was, it never truly escaped the shadow of its Z06 big brother. Mark my words: Fifty years from now, if anybody still cares about cars, they're going to talk about the C6 Z06 and wonder why it didn't get more respect when it was new. The Grand Sport had super-cool gills on the fenders, but it didn't have the aluminum backbone or the mighty LS7 that catapulted the Z06 onto the all-time list of great Corvettes.

The C7 Z06, by contrast, has a bit of a image problem. Maybe it's all the discussion about overheating, maybe it's the available automatic transmission, maybe it's the perception that it's not raw enough. Regardless, there are a lot of people, your humble author included, who are deeply interested in the idea of a widebody C7 without a supercharger and all the attendant hassle. This time, too, the Grand Sport is actually lighter than the Z06, which is just icing on the crossed-flag cake. It seems reasonable to suppose that it will be priced somewhere between the Stingray Z51 and the Z06, and if that's the case, it will be a screaming bargain.

Charlie Sixbe

Nobody is going use the phrase "screaming bargain" to describe the Porsche 911 R. It's more expensive than the GT3 RS, and most of the vaunted weight savings come from leaving expensive pieces like the air conditioner and the complex rear wing on the factory shelf. Yes, it has a magnesium roof. So does the GT3 RS.

Porsche has made a bit of a habit lately of charging more for less; until very recently, you paid extra money to get your Boxster without a convertible top. Such was not always the case. The 356 Speedster was the first great bargain Porsche, but just 24 short years ago the company offered most of the 911R's purist-friendly features on the 1993 RS America, which cost about 10 grand less than the Carrera 2 on which it was based. The RS-A was showroom poison—I was in the dealership game back then, and I remember it well—but it had a spectacular second act in the used market, and nowadays you will pay nearly twice as much for a 1993 RS America as you would for a base Carrera 2.

You can't blame Porsche for wanting to get a bit of that markup themselves instead of leaving it to the cars' future third owners. You also have to respect the marketing savvy behind releasing it as a limited edition and thus ensuring that they'll be a quick and profitable sale for the dealers. With that said, surely nobody can deny that it would be easy to make a six-speed base 911 with minimal equipment and sell it for considerably less than the $84,300 base price of the two-wheel-drive Carrera coupe. I realize that to do would to be to endanger the market position of the Cayman GTS. I also remember that once upon a time the 944 Turbo and 911 Carrera 3.2 were direct rivals in performance and pricing, but no children or kittens were injured as a result.

There's something disappointing about this 911 R. It's a supremely desirable mechanical object, and it strikes all the right notes from the slick tail to the houndstooth seats, but the basic idea behind it is "charge our most loyal customers extra for the stuff they like." As a multiple-Porsche owner, I find that unnerving and upsetting. This isn't the company with which I fell in love as a kid, and it's not the philosophy of product that led me to work nights and weekends, so I could have a 911 in my garage.

This isn't the way it's supposed to be.

This isn't the way it's supposed to be. General Motors is supposed to be the cynical corporation with the laser-sharp marketing and Sloan-plan pricing. Porsche is supposed to be the plucky bunch of iconoclasts who sell uncompromising enthusiast-focused vehicles to the cognoscenti. Precisely the reverse is happening. I don't like it.

Nor do I think it's particularly brilliant on Porsche's part to make the 911 R a garage-queen collector's edition while Chevrolet floods the streets with Grand Sports. If you're reading this website, chances are you're either a kid who loves cars or you were once a kid who loved cars. Me too. I vividly remember seeing 911 SCs and the like around my neighborhood when I was a precocious pre-teen. I remember riding my bicycle fourteen miles to see the first 944 Turbo S to arrive at my local dealership. I grew up wanting a 911 of my very own, a dream I fulfilled right after my 31st birthday.

Kids these days, if they think of Porsche at all, probably think of the company as the nice people who make their mommy's Macan or their neighbor's Cayenne. Imagine that you're a 10-year-old sitting in the back of a Porsche SUV on the way to school. You're paying attention to your iPhone or your Kindle or whatever when you hear a rumble. Something wicked this way comes. You look away from your electronic babysitter and glance out the window. There's a big black Corvette Grand Sport rumbling past, all unrestrained menace and polished testosterone. You've never seen anything like it.

That's how lifelong customers are made, right there. Porsche will eventually come to regret their decision to make their best and brightest products limited editions, methinks. But since it's too late for me, and I'm already a dyed-in-the-houndstooth fan of the company, I'll put my money where my mouth is, one last time. I want a proper less-is-more 911. Just like the 911 R, but without the magnesium roof and the wound-up engine. I'll take a six-speed coupe, no frills, cloth interior, base motor is fine. Put it in a showroom for whatever the Grand Sport ends up costing. Sixty-five grand, maybe. Seventy, tops. Give me the purist car at the purist price, and I'll show up at the dealership with check in hand. Make it Grand Prix White, please. You can do it, Porsche. Don't make me go to the dark side. I hear they have rookie stripes on the fender.

Born in Brooklyn but banished to Ohio, Jack Baruth has won races on four different kinds of bicycles and in seven different kinds of cars. Everything he writes should probably come with a trigger warning. His column, Avoidable Contact, runs twice a week.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io