Just yesterday we were talking about the manufacturer hi-jinks that goes on at the Nürburgring Nordschleife. And now, overnight, Porsche have invented a new performance segment — the four-door all-electric sports car — and claimed a new record in that segment to boot with their upcoming Taycan.
The fully electric sports GT set a lap-time of 7min 42sec. You can watch a video of the full lap above.
“The Taycan is [...] suitable for race tracks and it convincingly proved that here on the world’s most challenging circuit,” said official Porsche test driver Lars Kern.
“Again and again, I am impressed at how stable the all-electric sports car handles in high-speed sections, such as Kesselchen, and how neutrally it accelerates from tight sections, such as Adenauer Forst.”
While there is some questionable 'Green Hell' fever here, like the fact that the Taycan that did the lap is still a (heavily camouflaged) prototype, the difference between this and yesterday's Lynk & Co is that it's a guaranteed, global, production car.
We should expect its production variant to closely echo the one that took on the Nürburgring.
Read more: Porsche NZ’s unprecedented demand for Taycan EV
You could say that the Taycan and the Nürburgring have been linked to each other since birth. Porsche's Tesla Model S and Audi GT rival has had plenty of its development — both on simulators and in the real world — undertaken at the historic German venue.
The time itself is very quick, pipping supercars like the Lamborghini Murcielago and first-generation Ford GT while simultaneously equalling the time set by Porsche's own 997 GT3 and Cayman GT4.
Those points of reference might be quite old by today's standards, but they're also not weighed down by a heavy EV battery system and they only sit two people while the Taycan seats four.
To put the Taycan's time in a more current context, it's four seconds slower than its Porsche stablemate — the Panamera — and 17 seconds slower than the beastly Mercedes-AMG GT 63 S 4Matic+. Simultaneously, it's one second quicker than the track-orientated Honda Civic Type R FK8.
Now to convince Elon to take the time on with a Tesla Model S ...