Is the Porsche Macan GTS its ultimate family sportscar? We took one on a 1,500 mile road trip

Sometimes the right moment combines with the right roads to make you really fall in love with a car.

With the Porsche Macan GTS, it was a couple of hours of glorious driving across the countryside of south-west France on rolling empty roads.

What made that really stand out, however, was this was the final third of a journey that only an hour earlier I’d declared to be in my top five worst ever.

Set loose on those flowing French D roads, away from the cursed traffic that had turned what should have been an easy first hour of our journey into a three-hour slog, the Macan GTS showcased its exceptional skills and turned my mood around.

It’s one of those drives that I have burnt into my memory and months later I can picture moments from it.

Quite the switch from a day I’d previously been keen to erase forever.

Space and pace: The Macan GTS is Porsche's fire-breathing version of its compact SUV

The Porsche Macan GTS: A family sportscar

My impression before that of the Macan GTS was that it was an exceptionally accomplished car, as expensive, fast modern cars tend to be.

You could tell the top-end Macan was a cut above – as any car with a price that starts at £75,000 should be - but it hadn’t really released the Porsche within yet.

A week earlier, we had cruised down from England to the west coast of France, with a stop overnight in the countryside near Le Mans.

The Macan had munched the autoroute miles - and propelled forward by a 2.9 litre V6 petrol engine putting out 440 horsepower, it clearly had a turn of pace when it came to a slip road or motorway overtake.

It was comfortable, refined, had a gorgeous interior, and was more spacious than you’d think, considering this is Porsche’s baby SUV and not a particularly large car.

There was stacks of room in the artfully designed cockpit for me and my wife, and plenty in the back, where legroom is good and my two daughters, aged 13 and 11, were enjoying a club class ride.

So far though, when I had stretched the Macan’s legs on the motorway and brief stretches of back roads, it had been effortlessly slipping from canter to gallop.

Now though, on twisting D roads punctuated with long straights - requiring the customary French back roads overtake – the Macan GTS was a thoroughbred properly unleashed.

The Porsche may be the result of exceptional German engineering, but there is nowhere that I would rather have been piloting it at that moment than through the Charente and Dordogne’s scenes of La France Profonde.

Our Macan GTS was four-up and packed to the rafters with luggage, but the handling was exceptional. The firm suspension gave the Macan a dancer’s poise, despite its near 2,000kg weight, and the ride was perfectly balanced with just enough of a shimmy to avoid feeling overly hard.

Porsche's seven-speed PDK automatic gearbox, coupled with what it refers to as 'active all wheel drive' is faultless, while the GTS has its own specific active suspension.

The steering wheel dial offers the chance of three modes, Comfort, Sport and Sport Plus, and while the first will see you happy in almost all driving conditions, swapping to Sport tunes things up a bit to reward the driver.

You could feel this was a genuinely fast car. Finally given the stage it deserved, the Porsche turned up the dial and showed off the power that on paper delivers a 4.5 second 0 to 62mph time and 169mph top speed, but more importantly for real-world driving means it’s astonishing on the overtake.

Now it felt special: no longer a fast SUV but a genuine family sportscar. I could see what all the fuss is about over the Macan GTS.

Over the course of the next two hours, I fell firmly in love with it.

At one point, my wife turned to me and said: ‘You’re enjoying this aren’t you?’

No words were needed. My grin, in reply, said everything.

A Macan boot's boot space is decent and practical - and will be no stranger to a Waitrose bag

Can the Macan GTS handle mundane motoring?

If you had the money, moments like that of pure driving pleasure are why you’d buy a Macan GTS. But what’s it like in life’s more mundane motoring moments?

Could you live with it driving around town, doing a tip run, or ferrying the family from A to B?

Beyond the fuel economy, which I’ll get onto later, I’d argue that the Macan GTS is a surprisingly practical car.

Albeit that shouldn’t really be a surprise, as the standard Macan that the GTS has emerged from is a pretty handy family wagon. Who’d have thought 30 years ago we would be writing that about a Porsche.

There's a reason why the Macan is a middle-class driveway favourite, combining stye, practicality and performance, with the bragging rights of owning a Porsche. I imagine the concern for some potential Macan GTS buyers, however, would be that cranking everything up to the max for performance, might render it a little too fire-breathing for everyday use.

I must admit that while obviously keen to spend a fortnight with one, I did have a similar concern about racking up 1,500 miles in a GTS. I had visions of rock-hard ride, over-engineering, and painful driving in slow moving traffic.

I needn’t have worried. The Macan GTS is docile and easy to drive when it needs to be. It’s got good visibility and a ride that is firm but supple and comfortable. It’s a doddle to drive round town and has none of the lurch that some may fear from a fast car driven slowly.

The GTS is the fastest Macan but Porsche has kept the styling tweaks and adornments subtle

The quad exhaust pipes with carbon fibre surrounds and styling tweaks say GTS to those who know - otherwise most would have to check the subtle black badging to realise

The Macan GTS’s subtle looks also mean that you won’t feel massively self-conscious. If you know, you know it’s a GTS, but there are no wings and garish adornments to shout to the public that you’re in FAST PORSCHE.

It’s considerably less in your face than many BMW M cars or Mercedes AMGs. Chances are that most people in the Waitrose car park won't even realise you could give a supercar a run for its money.

They may give the Macan some admiring glances though. Our test car was delivered in a fetching Copper Ruby Metallic colour that added £2,250 to the quoted price, plus the GTS sports package, which for an extra £7,592 gets you a boatload of extras, ranging from some performance upgrades, to styling tweaks and interior elements.

Press cars tend to come fully loaded, so there was a handful of other extras on the spec sheet, delivering a final cost for the car I drove of £87,756. There’s no real way of pretending that isn’t an astronomical amount of money.

The Macan GTS's stylish cockpit has a wraparound feel. A smart 10.9 inch touchscreen sits in the centre of the dash, ahead of the elegant centre console and automatic gear selector.

The GTS has eight-way front sports seats with leather and Race-Tex alcantara

What’s a Porsche Macan like inside?

At this point, it’s worth stating that it’s unlikely many people reading this review will actually buy a Macan GTS. However, they might be tempted to buy a Macan, which is far and away Porsche’s biggest selling model.

I’ve driven more run-of-the-mill Macans in the past. They are cracking cars, great to drive and you can see why owners tend to be very happy with them.

What you get with both the standard Macan and the souped-up version is a luxury SUV that combines a relatively compact footprint with a decent amount of space.

It’s obviously not as capacious as its big brother the Cayenne, but it is big enough for most people’s needs, most of the time.

There’s lots of space in the front, where the driver and passenger sit comfortably but can feel a bit of sportiness from the wraparound cockpit. In the back, leg room is good, head room is decent, and three adults can sit happily for shorter journeys but wouldn’t want to go too far like that.

In the GTS, we got a leather and Race-Tex alcantara with blackbrushed aluminium interior with eight-way sports seats in the front. The driver has Porsche's smart 4.8 inch colour display in the centre of the instrument cluster, while a well-performing and relatively intuitive 10.9 inch touchscreen sits in the centre of the dash, ahead of the elegant centre console and automatic gear selector.

We wouldn’t have got much more in the boot of the Macan, but we weren’t exactly travelling light. I had packed it full of everything you’d need for 15 days away – and then squeezed in some more stuff that we probably didn’t need: luggage, bodyboard, skimboard, skateboard, bike helmets, volleyball, fishing nets, beach chairs etc.

The boot capacity is 488 litres, a touch smaller than an Audi Q5 or BMW X3's, andexpands to 1,503 litres if you drop the rear seats flat. I discovered that you can also pack a surprising amount of stuff around the spare wheel in the compartment under the boot floor. Handy when you've decided to take too much on holiday.

The 40, 20, 40 split means the practical middle rear seat also folds down separately to the seats either side, so you can fit longer items through, meaning the Macan passes the ski, snowboard or surfboard test.

Packed tight: We wouldn't have got much more in the boot of the Macan but it swallowed a surprising amount of stuff - enough for a fortnight's family holiday and more

With diesel retired, internal combustion engine Macans only come as petrol cars now, although a fully-electric, differently-styled Macan EV is also a £71,200 option.

For most Macan buyers, petrol remains the answer though and the price you will pay for a fast luxury SUV, even if it is a relatively compact one, is fuel economy.

The four-cylinder Macan, which starts at £56,000, quotes fuel economy of 26.4 to 28mpg, the £63,000 six-cylinder Macan S quotes 24.1 to 25.4mpg, and the Macan GTS has official figures of 24.1 to 25mpg. Those are numbers with the power to make your wallet say ouch.

So, what did we really get over a fortnight combining long-distance motorway, with town and country road driving? Over 1,535 miles it was 24.4mpg, respectable in comparison to those official stats, but that is something that would dent the finances as an owner.

Nobody buys a Macan GTS for the fuel economy though.

The Macan is relatively compact - at 1.62m high it isn't as tall as a 1.66m Mini Countryman

Porsche Macan GTS: The Cars & Motoring verdict:

It’s easy to find things to praise in a modern-day expensive car that you’ve been lent for a review, but it’s not always the case that you really fall for them.

I’ve always found the best test of whether a car really does cut the mustard, is how sad you are to give it back. And I really did feel a tug on the heart strings with the Macan GTS.

It wasn’t just that glorious couple of hours driving that I highlighted at the start of the review, it was the sheer accomplishment of the Macan GTS: the handling, the comfort and luxury, the practicality and that once you stretch it you realise it feels special.

This is arguably Porsche's family sportscar. A 911 has four seats but good luck squeezing the family in, a Cayenne or Panamera is too bulky and a Taycan may be an exceptional vision of the future but is all-electric.

My long-held opinion is that if you want a fast, practical family car then you should really buy a saloon or an estate not a high-riding SUV. They are set up better for the job, lighter by design, and a bit kinder to the planet.

I’d stick to my guns on that, but sometimes as a car lover you should celebrate something for what it has achieved, particularly in these final years of purely petrol-powered models.

So, I tip my hat to Porsche, the Macan GTS is probably one of the all-time great family sportscars. Car makers won’t be making them like this for much longer.