The Porsche 919 Hybrid and 911 RSR race cars have been tweaked, revamped, and readied for the 2015 FIA WEC season. All that the German marque is awaiting is the first race: the 6 Hours of Silverstone, on Sunday, April 12th.
To get you ready for the big kick-off race this weekend, the manufacturer wheeled both the Porsche 919 Hybrid and 911 RSR out to the track, and shot this glamorous, heart-pounding hype video. It’s captivating.
Yet even more than the fast cuts, high-speed footage and gorgeous torrent of sound, something else about this video sticks with us: the on-screen text at the end. “Mission: Future Sportscar” is all that it says.
So why is this making us hyperventilate? Well, regular visitors of the site might recall our coverage from ages past of the automaker’s initial announcement that it would be running not two, but three Porsche 919 Hybrid race cars at the 24 Hours of Le Mans this year. At the time, Porsche Board Chairman Matthias Müller had said that this was because “the highly demanding motorsport programme contributes directly to the development of future sports cars for the road.”
We had assumed at the time that this was simple marketing speak, and that at the most, Porsche’s engines and hybrid powertrains would bear only a passing resemblance to those tried in the race car. But more recently, we covered a speculative story from Jalopnik that posed the question: “What else might become of the Porsche 919 Hybrid’s V4 petrol engine?” It’s a seemingly dead-end question, until you consider that nearly every racing-developed engine in Porsche’s past has served double-duty by powering a road car.
So, we ask you: is this a hint? Could the 918 Spyder’s replacement come sooner than expected, using not a V8 as expected, but some version of the V4 and hybrid powertrain as found on the Porsche 919 Hybrid race car? Or, could this same powertrain end up in some form or another powering the confirmed future 911 Hybrid?
Or maybe we’re counting our chicks before they’ve hatched.
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