Porsche’s priority for every new car it makes is to make it feel like a Porsche should. But that’s no mean feat when it comes to the most complex road car ever made, writes Matt Kimberley, Press Association motoring writer.

It’s an unquestionably beautiful thing, the Porsche 918 Spyder. The least expensive, but most complex, of the new-age Holy Trinity of cardom that also spans the McLaren P1 and the LaFerrari, was clearly built with form in mind.

There’s a clean simplicity to its aerodynamic lines that’s matched by irresistible substance, most obviously in the huge cooling vents behind the passenger doors. With almost 900 bhp to call upon thanks to a combination of V8 petrol and electric power, you can bet the family silver that it’s every bit as rapid as it looks.Those few lip-bitingly, fist-clenchingly lucky owners – all 918 Spyders are now sold – also get to enjoy a short-range electric-only drive mode, advanced brake energy recuperation and four-wheel steering. It’s a hybrid, but this is no urban runabout.

Track targets

As you’d expect, the 918 Spyder was in part tested and developed at the Nurburgring in Germany, where dozens of prototype sports cars – and parts to fit them – are tested to the limit. Sometimes even to destruction.

Marc Lieb is one of Porsche’s star racers in its World Endurance Championship team, and conveniently he also did a lot of the pre-production Nurburgring testing in the 918. This is a man who knows how tricky it was to balance so many new technologies into the firm’s Holy Grail. “A lot of people hate all these electronics,” he frowns. “But at the end what they can create is absolutely phenomenal, and with these tools you can create with the 918 an absolute weapon, performance wise, but also a really handy car for the normal drive. This balance is absolutely phenomenal; absolutely crazy.”

Race engineering

He sits in the VIP lounge during a gap in his schedule during the Bahraini round of the World Endurance Championship; an event at which Porsche would go on to secure its first double podium finish. I ask about his work developing the 918 Spyder.

“I was mainly working on the Nordschleife [the Nurburgring’s infamous ‘North Loop’], to get the maximum performance out on the racetrack, but I was always surprised at how handy the car was. Credit goes to all the engineers who worked on the car.”

Credit indeed, and they were clever about how they kept their secrets. Porsche’s R&D chief, Wolfgang Hatz, who joins the interview from his usual place in the pit garage, explains how the company kept its pioneering front axle brake energy recovery system from the automotive press.

“We had the idea and built it up into a 911 before we used it in the 918,” he chuckles with justifiable smugness, having hidden the secret in plain sight. Nobody would take a second glance at a normal-looking 911 tooling around public roads.

Rapid Progress

Thanks to Marc’s work on track and the engineers’ efforts at the Weissach research centre, the 918 took shape remarkably quickly. But it’s the confidence with which the performance can be poured so liberally onto the tarmac that stays with the race driver, who also helped in the making of some of the highest-performance Porsche 911s in history.

“It was a phenomenal job how they made the car so easy to drive.” He shakes his head in apparent disbelief. “The four-wheel drive makes it a lot easier to put the power down compared to a LaFerrari or McLaren – they are a lot more tricky. “The most interesting thing, which we’re not allowed to run in the race car, is four-wheel steering, which makes the 918 extremely stable in fast corners and very agile in slow corners. It gives you more of an advantage.”

And there’s more

And there’s more to come, now that his 919 Hybrid is hitting its stride at the end of its first competitive season. “There’s a lot of stuff going on in Weissach for the road cars.

“They have a really big exchange now with the race department and it’s really interesting to see that the road car department is so interested in what we are doing right now with the fuel strategies.

“They’re more interested in the fuel consumption and the fuel strategy, and I think in, let’s say, two or three years we’ll see a big step also for the road cars, from the 919.”

There you have it. Road car technology led to the race-winning 919 Hybrid, and the race car tech has already begun feeding back to the road. Now that, I think, is the definition of win-win.