On the weekend of Le Mans celebrating its centenary and Porsche its 75th anniversary, you didn’t expect anything else from the German icon than a concept car inspired by some of the most successful race cars of the last century, did you? With its LED eyes set on being the fastest road-legal car to lap the Nürburgring Nordschleife, the Mission X will be Porsche’s most extreme road car ever.
The Mission X is a concept for now, but Porsche rarely displays such a thing that doesn’t make production, and not only is it designed to be the fastest road car on the Ring, but it will also generate more downforce than the new 911 GT3 RS, charge twice as quickly as a Taycan S and produce 1bhp per kilo.
Inspired by Porsche’s sports car icons and the handful of hypercars that have been created in Stuttgart, including the 959, Carrera GT and 918 Spyder, the Mission X blends the company’s motorsport design and heritage with tomorrow’s technology.
Measuring 4.5 metres long with a 2.73 metre wheelbase, the Mission X has a footprint that matches the Carrera GT and 918’s and will be built – yes, it will eventually become a production-ready hypercar for launch from 2027 – on a new electric hypercar architecture that will provide a foundation for future potential products from within the Porsche empire, such as Bugatti’s next generation of hypercars.
At 1.2 metres high it’s as low as the racing snakes its design is inspired by. From the 906 and 908 racers, to the 917 and beyond, Porsche head of style Michael Mauer and his team have immersed themselves in the company’s rich back catalogue of endurance racers to create a homage to those legendary machines. With hinged doors attached to the A-pillar and roof, a glass dome canopy and 20 and 21-inch wheels aerodynamically designed to aid brake cooling, the Mission X is a future racer with roots inspired by the successes of the past.
The Mission X’s development will see Porsche’s engineering team work closely with Rimac Automobili – in which it took a 45 percent stake in 2022 – not only on the car’s chassis design but also its 900-volt battery and motor technology and architecture too. The Mission X is not a further evolution of the Rimac Nevera hypercar but will be an all-new machine.
Powered by a centrally mounted battery, drive will arrive at each wheel via individual motors, with a total output expected to be in the region of 1500bhp to power the 1500kg machine. The batteries will be developed by Porsche’s new specialist battery company Cellforce, a joint venture with battery specialist Customcells that was established in 2021 and focuses on battery cell technology for motorsport and bespoke vehicle applications.
Porsche has a number of objectives for the Mission X. Top of the to-do list is to set the fastest lap time of the Nordschleife for a road-legal car, a record currently held by the Mercedes-AMG One with a time of 6.35:18. The quickest lap by an EV is held by VW’s ID.R with a time of 6.05:34, while Porsche holds the outright lap record of 5.19:55, set by the 919 Evo.
The Mission X will also generate ‘significantly more’ downforce than the current 911 GT3 RS, which produces 860kg at 177mph, so expect around 1000kg of the magic stuff pushing this fully charged hypercar into the surface. On a more practical side, Porsche has said its EV hypercar will charge at twice the speed of the current Taycan S; the electric supersaloon takes 22.5 minutes to go from five to 80 percent charge using an 800-volt charger.
Porsche isn’t one to show concepts and then simply retire them to its museum, with the expectation being that the Mission X will take a similar four-year period of development that the Mission E required to go from motor-show crowd-puller to Taycan sales success. The public will get their chance to see the concept over Le Mans weekend and at Goodwood Festival of Speed later in 2023.