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14th October 2017

Porsche’s new 911 produces so much energy, you could run the entire Goodwood Racecourse off it. Erin Baker salutes an automotive powerhouse

Goodwood Magazine
Porsche
Tech
Magazine
Cars

Porsche pulled the wraps off its most powerful, mad-as-a-box-of-frogs 911 to date at Goodwood Festival of Speed this summer: the 911 GT2 RS. With a price tag of £207,506, and limited availability, plus the increasing propensity of any limited-edition 911 to travel only one way in value, this car may turn out to be the most expensive second-hand 911 so far, too.

This may be the ultimate poster boy for the eco brigade: a car that can power a house’s electrical supply, rather than the home powering the car

What’s more, we easily pushed the price north of £240,000 with endless fiddling on the online configurator, taking the cost even higher with the addition of the performance-boosting Weissach Package, which adds such fripperies as a roll-cage, just to be on the safe side. You can smother the interior in carbon, have the dials in Guards Red, paint the climate-control panel bright blue, add IsoFix points in the front passenger seat, get the 12 o’clock steering wheel marking in red… and before you know it, it’s lunchtime.

But this car wouldn’t be a Porsche if the truly staggering price tag were not matched by an equally eyebrow-raising power output. The twin-turbocharged petrol engine develops 700 horsepower and the rear wheels of the 911 GT2 RS are capable of producing 500,000 watts of power. Now here’s an electrical discussion about a car we’re all keen to delve into. Bless Porsche: while the rest of the world debates the recharging time of a Nissan Leaf and how much energy the battery is capable of storing, Porsche has built a car for which the talking point is how much electricity the rear wheels can generate. This may be the ultimate poster boy for the eco brigade: a car that can power a house’s electrical supply, rather than the home powering the car.

To give you an example of just how powerful the GT2 RS is, consider the following, worked out by Goodwood Estate’s sustainability manager (you don’t often hear “GT2 RS” and “sustainability” in the same sentence): 500,000 W means that if we took the car on a splendid jaunt from London to Goodwood at the peak revs required for maximum horsepower all the way (wishful thinking) it would generate 500 kWh. That means the Porsche's engine, via the rear wheels, could power the entire Goodwood Racecourse (413 kWh), or Goodwood House (183.4 kWh) and The Kennels (143 kWh) combined. It could certainly light up the entire hillclimb at Goodwood, given that one new light bulb uses 15 watts. The future’s bright.

This article is taken from the Goodwood magazine, Autumn 2017 issue