The Holy Trinity

Three of the greatest Porsches prove there's three different ways to get to supercar heaven.

- Laurent Chevalier

THE PORSCHE 918 Spyder is a masterpiece of engineering. It’s like one of those high-end chronographs that are complicated for complication’s sake, watches you can gaze at for hours and wonder just how they squeezed so much ingenuity and technology into such a small case?

Your first reaction on seeing a 918 is fascination; it’s just more intriguing than mere supercars. Why? Because the 918 appears to resolve one of the fundamental equations of quantum mechanics: Combining very high performance with electricity, something Porsche demonstrates far more effectively than Ferrari due to the 918’s fully electric mode.

On battery power alone, the 918 is powerful enough to silently humble a hot hatch at the drag strip and can travel around 30km without using a single drop of premium. But at any moment, of course, you have the option of waking up its 453kW 4.6-litre V8 and launching into screaming hyper speed mode. The 918 first leaves you lost for words with its electric mode and then speechless with its thermal one.

We’re not here to relay hybrid propaganda, but the performance duality of the 918 is genuinely exciting in the real world. The contrast is, well, fascinating. Compared to the Carrera GT, the most noticeable difference is torque. And it’s a big difference. The Spyder’s 1280Nm is available instantly and any time you want it, whereas the GT’s comparatively modest 590Nm is infinitely more elastic and progressive.

As for the obvious question of how the 918 compares to LaFerrari, it is simply very different. The Italian hybrid hypercar gives the impression of more power – and with a combined 708kW it has 56kW more than the 918 – but its delivery is not as instantaneous as the Porsche’s. So it’s a draw.