"One fifty seven!" I bellowed at associate editor Scott Evans as we screamed into Turn 1 on the front straight of Big Willow. We were in Porsche's newest hyper-complex plaything for rich guys, the hybrid hypercar 918 Spyder. The price tag is basically $1,000,000. Of course that's for an actual production car. Scott and I were horsing around in a $10,000,000 hand-built prototype, Serial No. 000. Some days at work are better than others. And it was time for me to play. I'm strangely competitive for no good reason. I had to go faster than Scott.
0:00 / 0:00
If there's one thing you should know about the 918 Spyder, it's that it is a fast car. Tremendously fast. Ridiculously fast. Superlatively fast. Hack-writers-run-out-of-adjectives fast. Don't be fooled, Porsche has gone out of its way to confuse you with techno-sparkle. That's not the point. Nothing besides "holy wow, man, is this thing fast" is the point.
It has a flat-crank 4.6-liter V-8, two electric motors, seven clutches (two for the PDK transmission, two for the electric motors, one between the engine and rear motor and two for the rear differential) a 6.8 kW-hr battery, and "e-Hybrid" badges. But never mind all that jazz. All you need to know is fast. I mean, FAST!
In case you haven't peeped at the performance numbers: 0-60 mph in 2.4 seconds, making the 918 the quickest-accelerating thing we've ever tested. The quarter mile happens in 10 seconds flat and our man Scott Mortara swears there's another tenth of a second in there somewhere. The trap speed is a totally bonkers 145.2 mph. Of course that's not the fastest we've ever seen. That honor goes to the McLaren P1 - 9.8 seconds with a trap speed of 148.9. However, it takes the riotous Brit a leisurely 2.6 seconds to get to 60 mph. The same as the downmarket Porsche 911 Turbo S. Braking is pretty damn close to the best we've ever seen, 94 feet from 60 mph. Only much lighter Corvettes and Vipers stop any shorter (best ever was a Z07 package Z06 that stopped in 92 feet). The 918 Spyder did manage to shatter our figure-eight record- 22.8 seconds by that same Z06/Z07 - by more than half a second, in 22.2 seconds to be exact. But back to outright, vulgar speed.
I asked the Porsche dude how to beat Scott. "Put it in Race Hybrid mode, run around the track at about 4500 rpm and then you clear Turn 9 [the last turn before the big front straight], hit the red button." Which I then proceeded to do. My word. Or is that my bad word? The 918 exploded forward. I've driven quick cars - the Bugatti Veyron Vitesse leaps to mind - but none like this. The combination of the seamless electric torque-injection to the front wheels coupled with (but not mechanically connected to) the mighty V-8/electric motor combo hitting the mammoth 325/30R21 rear tires is intoxicating. Especially because the shrieking V-8's redline is 9150 rpm, so there's not a lot of gear changes taking place. The V-8 and rear motor feed their power through the PDK transmission, but the front motor doesn't. So when the car changes gears, the front wheels are still being powered. I think. Sure feels that way. Crazy. Er, better put, a whole new kind of crazy.
I kept my foot in it for as long as it felt sane, and then I kept going for another two count. Porsche dude next to me hollered, "One seventy one!" Yeah, so, according to the digital readout that I was hella not looking at, I hit 171 mph on the front straight at Big Willow. Is that fast? Well, a dear friend of mine who writes for one of our horrible competitors hit 162 mph in the 1200-horsepower Alpha 12. One of our good friends, former Bondurant instructor and current (creepy) heartthrob on the USA show "Graceland," Erik Valdez, claims he hit 166 mph in a Bugatti Veyron. So I'm gonna say that 171 mph is pretty dang fast.
So fast, in fact, that MT resident race car driver Randy Pobst only hit 170 mph on the front straight. Granted, Randy was probably trying to set up to make Turn 1 and I was only going for Vmax and panic braking. But hey, faster is faster. Speaking of which, we know the Veyron has a higher top speed, or at least I'll assume it does. Discounting that, however, the 918 Spyder is quicker everywhere else. The Porsche is also half the price, a decade newer, and can swallow a $19K, five-piece carbon-fiber luggage set. I've driven both and I'm telling you right here and now that the 918 obsoletes the Veyron. Remember too that Volkswagen Group makes both fantasy objects. Of course, the same week we finally were able to perform instrumented testing on the 918, spy shots of some newfangled Veyron running around the Nordschleife with an aluminum frame on its back popped up.
I will say to Bugatti what I told Randy when he was disappointed that I went faster than he did: Keep trying; you'll get there.
When I was just one-year-old and newly walking, I managed to paint a white racing stripe down the side of my father’s Datsun 280Z. It’s been downhill ever since then. Moral of the story? Painting the garage leads to petrolheads. I’ve always loved writing, and I’ve always had strong opinions about cars.
One day I realized that I should combine two of my biggest passions and see what happened. Turns out that some people liked what I had to say and within a few years Angus MacKenzie came calling. I regularly come to the realization that I have the best job in the entire world. My father is the one most responsible for my car obsession. While driving, he would never fail to regale me with tales of my grandfather’s 1950 Cadillac 60 Special and 1953 Buick Roadmaster. He’d also try to impart driving wisdom, explaining how the younger you learn to drive, the safer driver you’ll be. “I learned to drive when I was 12 and I’ve never been in an accident.” He also, at least once per month warned, “No matter how good you drive, someday, somewhere, a drunk’s going to come out of nowhere and plow into you.”
When I was very young my dad would strap my car seat into the front of his Datsun 280Z and we’d go flying around the hills above Malibu, near where I grew up. The same roads, in fact, that we now use for the majority of our comparison tests. I believe these weekend runs are part of the reason why I’ve never developed motion sickness, a trait that comes in handy when my “job” requires me to sit in the passenger seats for repeated hot laps of the Nurburgring. Outside of cars and writing, my great passions include beer — brewing and judging as well as tasting — and tournament poker. I also like collecting cactus, because they’re tough to kill. My amazing wife Amy is an actress here in Los Angeles and we have a wonderful son, Richard.Read More
