The New Porsche Panamera Is Either Eight or 13 Seconds Faster at the Nurburgring
For a big car, the Porsche Panamera is impressively quick. The 2016 Panamera Turbo lapped the Nürburgring Nordschleife in 7:38, and the soon-to-be-revealed face-lifted Panamera Turbo S just beat that record by more than eight seconds. Or 13 seconds, depending on how you count it.
In the past, the Nürburgring Nordschleife used a separate start and finish line for manufacturer lap times, cutting out a 656-foot section of the track. But starting in 2019, the Nürburgring changed that, establishing a single start/finish line at the beginning of the "T13" straightaway. This means that, before last summer, a Nürburgring lap time represented the 12.8 miles from the start to the finish lines; now, a lap time represents 12.94 miles. (For a more detailed explanation, including the history behind the different layouts, check out this article from Bridge to Gantry.)
Back to today. Porsche says the new Panamera Turbo runs a 7:29.81 around the Nordschleife, an 8.19-second improvement. This makes the Panamera Turbo the quickest "executive" car around the famous track, just beating the Mercedes-AMG GT 63 S Four Door, which ran a 7:30.11 around the 12.9-mile circuit in 2018. The only quicker four-door is the limited-production Jaguar XE SV Project 8, which did a 7:23.16 last year.
But if you go by the old start and finish lines, Porsche says the Panamera runs a 7:25.04—nearly 13 seconds faster than its predecessor.
How did the new Panamera shed so much time around the Green Hell? While Porsche hasn't released final specs on the new super sedan just yet, our colleagues at Car and Driver report that the new Turbo S could make as much as 620 hp, up from 550 in the outgoing model. Chassis tuning has been tweaked, and the Turbo S gets ultra-sticky Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 tires, which surely helped around the 160-some corners at the Nordschleife. You might think these tires are extreme for a luxury sedan, but Porsche will offer them as an optional upgrade, and AMG used similar rubber on the GT Four Door that ran at the 'Ring.
Porsche factory driver and Nürburgring ace Lars Kern set the new Panamera Turbo S lap time on July 24th, with a notary on the scene to verify the time. The Panamera was fit with a racing seat and a roll cage for safety, but otherwise was a stock, production-spec car.
We'll see the new Turbo S along with the rest of the face-lifted Panamera range later this month. Expect more power across the board, chassis tweaks, and a new hybrid model to slot between the 4 e-Hybrid and the Turbo S e-Hybrid.
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