The Porsche team in charge of Public Relations for the Taycan must be big Top Gear fans from the Three Amigos era. They keep coming up with wild ways of bringing attention to their electric sports car. I’d like you to imagine, the team sitting around, and someone says, ‘We should set the record for the longest nonstop drift on ice.’ As crazy as it sounds, they did it and broke the world record.
Taking place 150 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle in far northern Levi, Finland, at the Porsche Arctic Center, the Taycan team set about to break a record many of us never knew existed. They were required to create a drift circle of 59 meters and equip the car with sophisticated GPS tracking equipment to document the route, distance travel, and other actions such as the G-forces, driver’s wheel input, and accelerator and braking.
Porsche called Guinness World Records for the attempt and they were present to see this ice EV escapade unfold. The first attempt was aborted after 11 kilometers were traveled of the 14.809 kilometers recorded needed to break. The environmental conditions had deteriorated, and it appears their original spiked tires were digging a bit too deep into the frozen wonderland. After switching to a 1mm spike, the second attempt resulted in a win.
Team Porsche Taycan covered a distance of 17.503 kilometers or 132 laps of the 59-meter circle shattering the prior record. Immediately afterward Carl Seville with Guinness presented them with the record certificate for driver Jens Richter and Christian Lehwald, Managing Director of Porsche Arctic Center and Head of Porsche Experience and New Platforms at Porsche AG.
Christian was quoted as saying, “Our experiential marketing approach involves always trying out unusual things. In the Porsche Arctic Center, we find exceptionally good conditions for drifting on ice. With the new Taycan GTS, we have one of the most powerful electric vehicles on the market. So we were pretty confident that we could break the world record with this combination and accepted the challenge.”
This is now the fourth record Taycan has achieved. When I mentioned earlier about how bananas this nonstop drift on ice sounds, the prior records aren’t far off from the same energy. They currently hold the record for the fastest speed in an enclosed building (165.1km/h), the greatest altitude change by an electric car (5,573m), and covering 42.171 kilometers in 55 minutes of a nonstop drift.
Cheers!
M. T. Blake
