Warp Speed

Driving Porsche's Le Mans-winning hybrid is like being transported to a parallel universe – one where space and time blur in your brain.

- Paul Englert

CEREAL bars taste awful at five o’clock in the morning. But the sticky, cardboard-flavoured confections have the energy that I urgently need today, so I take a sip of water and force them down like a good boy.

Just four hours later I’m in Spain watching Porsche factory driver Neel Jani warming up a 919 Hybrid at Motorland Aragon. While it’s not the derestricted Evo version (the car that set the mindscrambling 5:19.54 new outright Nurburgring Nordschleife lap record), the LMP1-spec 919 hardly looks slow. Within a few laps Jani moves the braking point on the start/finish straight much closer to the entry of Turn One and sets a reference time of 1:23.503sec. These numbers will haunt me throughout the day. Why? Because after prep time in the Porsche simulator, a detailed safety briefing and even more detailed instruction on how to find my way around the 919’s cockpit, I’m being allowed to play at being a Porsche factory test driver for the day. And yes, that does include a ‘works’ contract. Well, of sorts.

Jani returns to the pits – job done. The four-cylinder turbo cuts out, the electric motor slowly turns itself off once the 919 is static, the car is jacked up and rolled into the garage. All is quiet. Earlier, while walking the 4.93km track, I had noticed some disconcerting wet patches, but the Le Mans 24 Hours-winning Swiss racer is full of laid-back confidence. “Everything’s dry, it’s very easy out there,” he smiles. This does not reassure me.