ASSAULT & BATTERY

The Taycan has always been quick, but Porsche just took things to a whole other level...

- PAUL HORRELL

As elephants in the room go, this one is really very elephantine. There is talk about having lightened it but the Porsche Taycan Turbo GT is still waaaay heavy. So if you wanted to make a track car, you surely wouldn’t start with a Taycan. Yet Porsche chose to let us loose on a track. Just as in the past it has bid us try its fastest Cayennes and Panameras on track, and they’re similarly weighty. At least the Taycan is lower than they are, and it accelerates like a firework. (Oh and to be fair, actual savannah elephants can be up to eight tonnes.)

I’m with Lars Kern, who has wrestled it around the Nürburgring Nordschleife in a scant seven minutes, seven and a half seconds. No four-door has gone faster, however powered. But we need to avoid the use of the word ‘saloon’ because in service of weight loss the GT, at least the version with the Weissach Pack which is what broke the record, doesn’t have a back seat.

The two seats remaining came from the 918, carbon-fibre corsets that clamp you without much regard to comfort. You can hear the whining of the gears in the rear two-speed transmission because there’s less sound-deadening material and the absent rear seat isn’t absorbing any, and besides Porsche went to the trouble of doing a new, stronger and inevitably noisier gearset just for the Turbo GT. On top of the motor is a brand new electrical inverter, capable of passing 900A instead of 600. So, more power because more current, and more strength to deploy it. These engineers spent big money going deep down the rabbit hole.