Hitting 196mph in the Porsche Panamera Turbo S e-hybrid

You join me in a brand new Porsche Panamera Turbo S e-hybrid. A car with a 4.0-litre bi-turbo V8 and e-motor, 670bhp, 627lb ft and a claimed top speed of 192mph. Claimed…

The paintwork is beige, the seats are beige, and the passenger’s face is going green. The speedo says it’s accelerating past 240kph (149mph). But I’m not in the driving seat. Not even the passenger seat, actually. Belted into one of the rear bucket seats, in fact, directly behind Porsche test driver Lars Kern.

Lars is the professional maniac you watched thrash a Panamera Turbo around the Nürburgring last year in a four-door record time of 7 minutes 38 seconds. I’m viewing our increasing speed on the rear seat entertainment screen, which also beams me revs, G-force, fluid temperatures, lap times, tyre pressures and, incongruously, a compass.

Several seconds previously, the Panamera pinballed my skull off the headrest as launch control dropkicked it from 0-62mph in 3.4 seconds. And now it’s going past 150mph. And there’s a sadistic-looking 90-degree tightening left-hander screaming towards us.

Lars isn’t braking. He just turns in, flat out. The scrambled egg I’d enjoyed three hours ago readies itself to be ejected extravagantly across the back of his head.

It’s an unpleasant sensation, having a luxury saloon do its best to put you on an impromptu diet. But the new Panamera Turbo S e-hybrid is capable of doing various unsettling things to unwary occupants.

Equipped with a squadron of acronyms, including ceramic brakes (PDCC), torque vectoring (PTV+), 48-volt anti-roll active suspension (PDCC) and a completely unhinged professional driver (OMFG) the enormous car sweeps without roll, understeer or even tyre squeal into the evil first turn of the Nardo test facility’s handling track.

The unwitting average human brain and stomach (i.e. yours truly) is not configured to understand that sort of crackers performance.

Enormous brains have set up the Turbo S e-hybrid. As promised at the gorgeous second Panamera’s launch last year, this is the second, angrier hybrid iteration of Porsche’s luxury barge.

A hybrid that’s about ultimate performance, not tax-dodging. The standard Panamera e-hybrid exists at a £79,715 price point and will make company car sense thanks to test cycle scores of 56g/km and 112mpg. And it’s hardly slow off the mark, recording 0-62mph in 4.6sec and a 173mph top speed.

The Turbo S e-hybrid, meanwhile, is the fastest Porsche four-door of all. The car combines the standard hybrid’s worthiness with the 4.0-litre, 542bhp bi-turbo V8 of the Panamera Turbo. A 130kg battery lives under the boot floor (with no loss of luggage capacity), powering a 134bhp, 295lb ft e-motor integrated directly into the eight-speed twin-clutch PDK transmission.

It’s a fiendishly complex drivetrain that directly applies lessons learned with the 918 Spyder hypercar – lessons like ‘electric power can make a car faster, not just greener’ – to a series Porsche model. It records unlikely NEDC figures of 97.4mpg and 66g/km.

It’s the start of an exercise in bringing regular Porsche buyers around to the idea of hybrid drive. If you want the fastest one, you’ll have to buy the hybrid one. And that’s a theme that’ll almost certainly continue in the next Cayenne, and the next 911.

System power from the Turbo S’s hybrid drivetrain is 670bhp and 627lb ft, versus 542bhp and 567lb ft in the Panamera Turbo. That gets the all-wheel drive Turbo S from 0-62mph 0.2sec faster than the Turbo, despite weighing around 300kg more in total.

Yep, this is a nigh-on 2300kg machine. It also costs £137,140 before options. Want another 150mm of legroom? The extended wheelbase ‘Executive’ version will set you back £146,545.

The top speed is a claimed 192mph, beating the Turbo by 2mph, and silencing anyone about to point out that Tesla makes a faster four-door.

You get the sense this car is Porsche’s way of saying “okay Elon, your car beats ours off the line. Well played. But ours will have yours on toast in corners, on the brakes, in a noise battle, in acceleration above 80mph and outright top speed, and doesn’t depend on a 30-minute recharge.”

Incidentally, the Turbo S can achieve up to 31 miles of zero-emission electric running before its 14kWh cell pack is depleted.

Back at Nardo, the V8 is running, hauling us between corners with sneering, seamless ease. Lars is attacking the kerbs, putting the outside wheels on the red’n’white.

“You couldn’t do this in a sports car, like a 911”, he explains calmly, gesturing, one hand off the wheel as we warp between bends. “They’re too light, they’d just be unstable. But this car is so heavy, it’s not unsettled by kerbs. You just get on the gas and go.” 

He fiddles with the bank of air-con switches and clicks his ventilated seat to Defcon 3 while executing a pinpoint right-left direction change that’d make a Cayman GT4 sweat.

The Turbo S’s freakish active anti-roll bars give it an agility and response to steering inputs that wouldn’t embarrass a car half a tonne lighter. It’s so flat, the body so tightly controlled, and just so bloody fast and…ah. There’s a crest ahead. 

Our entry speed is 209kph (129mph). For a brief moment, we are an airborne Panamera Turbo S. The car touches down expertly, requiring no steering connection, and Lars sets about hustling out of another third-gear left-hander, drifting the tail into steady oversteer on the exit.

“So, you must have a projection of what this car’s going to do at the Ring?” I grimace. “Some data, a target to aim for… A 7:35? 7:30?”

Lars – who is still driving utterly flat out – looks across, grins, then flicks his eyebrows in a non-committal racedriver sort of way and explains they do indeed have a time in mind, but won’t let on yet.

“I was sceptical when I heard the new Turbo S would be hybrid” he admits. “Too much weight, you know…but having driven it I’m really surprised at the power, the benefit you get from electric boost, and because there is more weight to the rear this car is actually a bit better balanced. It should be good…

As he guides the Turbo S onto a well-deserved cool-down lap, I silently beg my breakfast not to redecorate the Porsche’s luxuriant cabin and ponder the paradox of a 66g/km Porsche land yacht lapping the world’s most infamous circuit faster than a Koenigsegg CCR. Should be some video, that.

Nardo, which Porsche bought in 2012, isn’t really famous for its vicious handling circuit, though. Southern Italy’s automotive torture chamber is known for the bowl you can see from space: the 7.8-mile, perfectly circular banked circuit.

It’s four lanes wide, and it’s where Jaguar set the production car speed record of 217.1mph in 1992, and Koenigsegg briefly stole a march on the Veyron by recording 245mph in a CCX back in 2005. It is one of the very few places on Earth you can consistently run close to the v-max of the world’s fastest cars. Well, it’d be rude not to, since we’re here…

This time, I sit up front, partly because I’ve never been around Nardo before, and partly because now the chauffeur is Porsche LMP1 hybrid racer Timo Bernhardt. And that’s just too cool to miss.

We trundle onto the deserted bowl in a clockwise direction and settle into a relaxed motorway cruise. British motorway speeds, not German ones. Timo’s not allowed to gun it until passing the 3km signpost. When he does, the electricity smothers any sensation of turbo lag and the car surges hard and consistently through the gears.

After a few seconds we move into the top lane, skimming the Armco, and I’m disappointed to see we’re doing just 180kph. Wind noise around the mirrors and door seals is making quite a racket.

“Oh by the way”, says Timo casually. “Someone in the back seat needs to call out my speed in kilometres please, because the speedometer here has been reset into miles”. I look across again. Idiot. That wasn’t 180kph. It was 180mph. Hence the wind flutter. And now it’s 190mph. 193. 195. Timo’s hands are steady on the steering wheel. 196.

That’s equivalent to a nice round 315kph, which is the velocity Timo has been briefed not to exceed, and obediently sticks to. The Turbo S has got here effortlessly. It didn’t even feel laboured or straining as it ticked up those last few miles per hour. 

And it’s going around a constant corner. On the flat, this is possibly a 200mph car, and much as I get a kick out of engaging a Tesla’s Ludicrous mode and pretending to be Marty McFly, nothing earthbound in Elon’s world gets close to the double-ton. They’re not interested in top speed, or Ring times. But Porsche very much is, and this thing is set to be the new daddy.

What I find far more interesting than spec sheet willy-waving, though, is Porsche taking the leap to make its fastest, priciest Panamera a hybrid. As we know, there are plenty of folks out there who have to own the fastest version of a car on principle - it’s why AMG sells an inferior V12 S-class in addition to the vastly superior V8, and why the McLaren 570S will outnumber the far cheaper, identical-looking 540C. 

People want the ultimate version, and for the Panamera, that supreme model just so happens to be part-electric now. This is the future the hybrid hypercar holy trinity promised. If this is a sign of things to come, and it surely is, we’re all going to need much, much stronger stomachs.

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TG’s restomod idea of the week: Volvo P1800 with 300bhp turbo

Yes, let’s get this out of the way early – honey-voiced, eyebrow enthusiast Roger Moore drove one of these, both as Simon Templar in The Saint and out in the real world.

And looking at it now, it might be the least Volvo-ish Volvo of all time, especially given the company’s form for the past four decades.

Just look at it – it isn’t boxy, it won’t carry a bookcase (even if you sprang for the shooting brake version) and it’s rear-wheel drive.

So how do we celebrate the Volvo that proved the Swedish safety enthusiasts knew how to play? By wedging in one of their most playful engines, that’s how.

The lightweight inline five is as characterful an engine as Volvo has ever made, with a warbling thrum that’d be the perfect accompaniment (or is that counterpoint?) to the sleek lines of the P1800.

Of course, we could have gone for the newer, twin-charged 2.0-litre four from the new Polestar, but even though it has power to burn, it doesn’t have the same character of the five-cylinder turbo.

And besides, the 2.5-litre is plenty powerful enough – 300bhp and 325lb ft in the second-gen Focus RS, for instance, which is about as much as Volvo’s 4.4-litre V8 – and it’s proved to be a reliable beast. Although, it must be said, not as reliable as the three million miles and counting that New York resident Irv Gordon has clocked up in his P1800 – on the original engine, no less.

And, thanks to an aluminium head and block, the 2.5 is relatively lightweight – which is vital. The old pushrod unit from the original P1800 is by no means the heaviest engine in the world, but its cast iron construction means that you can swap in a modern all-aluminium setup, with turbocharging and intercooling, without incurring a serious weight penalty.

Yes, it’ll take some serious forethought and engineering to use an engine designed for a transverse, front-drive setup and rejig it to work in a longitudinal, rear-drive application. But it was hard to break the sound barrier, travel to the bottom of the Mariana Trench and fly to the moon, wasn’t it?

We could have used the B21 ‘Redblock’ engine from the Volvo 200 Series, which was canted over to account for the added height of the new alloy head and the overhead cam it contained. And, with outputs approaching 200bhp in the turbo version, most would say that it’s more than enough for the P1800. Then there’s the fact that it’s already set up for rear-drive.

And we can’t really argue with any of that. But, y’know, five-cylinder. Come on, admit that it sounds cool. And besides, not every model will be a 300bhp monster. In fact, we’ll kick things off with a much more tame 220bhp from the standard 2.5T Mondeo from a few years back. A mid-spec version would bridge the gap, as mid-spec versions tend to, but it’d all be built around the idea of a longitudinal five-cylinder turbo. Lovely.

To get that power down to the road, we’d use the five-speed M90 transmission from the Volvo 960. As a five-speed, it’d be one up on the original four (with optional overdrive), which would be a much more modern solution to drive ratios.

The solid rear axle is all well and dandy for the standard P1800, but we’re not sure how safe it’d be with 300bhp on tap. Semi-trailing arms would be a step in the right direction, but we’d leapfrog that for a proper multilink rear end, teamed up with a limited-slip diff.

Brakes would be similarly uprated, with vented discs front and rear. We’d try to keep the wheels and tyres as small as physics will allow, to keep the dainty proportions of the P1800 to shine through. We would be removing the chunky bumpers, mind you, because that’s the cleanest expression of the original design (at least that’s what we’ll write on our website).

In terms of actual performance figures, the relatively heavy (for the time) P1800 would mean somewhere in the five and six seconds for a nought to sixty dash – depending on engine spec –  which is about twice as quick as the original article and not shabby for more than 1.1 tons of Volvo. If you really got a good launch off in the 300bhp version, you might even see high fours. And that’s very not too shabby indeed. Top speed would be well in excess of the 110mph or so of the standard P1800, and probably around 165mph, considering the slippery bodywork.

The restomods would extend to the P1800 shooting brake, which might be what we’re most excited about. There’s something so wilfully wrong, and yet so wonderfully right, about a dainty two-door Volvo wagon with a snorting 300bhp five-cylinder under the bonnet. And let’s not forget that it got the nickname of ‘The Fish Van’ in Sweden and ‘Snow White’s Coffin’ in Germany.

Or if that’s not really your style, how about an Aston Martin V8? Yes, you read that correctly. Sounds like sacrilege, right? Wrong – it’s an historical homage.

Yes, happily enough, back in 1961, Aston Martin took a P1800 and fitted it with a 2.5-litre, four-cylinder prototype engine of its own making (see above). To fit the tall head and its dual overhead cams, they fitted a reshaped bonnet with a very large bulge in the middle. And this is a good thing.

It never made it past prototype stage, but we feel that this is enough of a reason to make a small run of Aston V8-powered P1800s, y’know, just to grab all the headlines. Then we’d settle into a comfortable future of taking turbo five-cylinder Volvo engines and combining them with the least boxy Volvo ever. Job done.