German luxury carmaker Porsche’s new 911 GT3 R Hybrid is the world’s first hybrid GT racing car, which will be making its debut on October 2 in the 1,609 kilometres, 10-hour-maximum final in the American Le Mans Series.
At a Washington event, it showed off sleek lines and the ground-breaking new hybrid technology, developed for racing, but which Porsche ultimately wants to incorporate into its other cars. “This car shows that being environmentally efficient doesn’t have to be boring. It can be fast, it can be sexy, it can be competitive,” Patrick Long, a 29-year-old Porsche factory driver and one of a handful of men to have gripped the wheel and shifted the gears of the new Porsche GT hybrid.
“Hybrids don’t have to make no noise and drive slowly down the road.
They can be loud, exciting race cars,” he said.
The car has the body of a 2010 Porsche 911 GT3 R with a four-litre, flat-six, 480 horsepower combustion engine in the rear. Upfront, its unique hybrid system harnesses two electric motors and a flywheel to generate, store and release power. When a driver brakes on one of the many curves on a race course, the electric motors, which are coupled to the wheels, generate an electric current that powers up the flywheel. Energy is released from the flywheel during normal acceleration and automatically delivered to the front wheels to support the combustion engine and reduce fuel consumption.
Energy can also be requested by the driver — to overtake a rival racer, for example — by pushing a paddle on the steering wheel to request a “boost”.
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