Porsche parked its orange-and-white 911 GT3 R Hybrid at a media event on Tuesday at a former bathhouse in the East Village, where the racecar was definitely the hottest body in the room.

Audi’s diesel-driven racecars have already dominated at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Now Porsche will see if a hybrid can pull the same trick of saving fuel while shrieking toward the checkered flag. The driver, Marc Lieb, a 29-year-old native of Stuttgart, Germany, has been testing the car that Porsche will run in a series of European races leading up to the 24 Hours of Nürburgring in May.

But you don’t have to look for a hybrid battery pack inside the Porsche, or wonder where it would fit in the rear-engined racer. Like a conventional hybrid, the Porsche does capture energy from its brakes. But instead of a battery, the Porsche stores the electricity in a huge flywheel generator that is plopped next to the driver. That flywheel sends brief 160-horsepower squirts of power to the Porsche’s front wheels through dual electric motors, giving the Porsche a burst of acceleration while momentarily turning it into an all-wheel-drive car. At all times, the roughly 480-horsepower internal combustion engine continues to power the rear wheels.


The flywheel can store 0.2 kilowatt hours of energy and spins at a dizzying 40,000 r.p.m. That flywheel, Mr. Lieb said, requires only a few corners worth of brutal racetrack braking to fully charge up. Mr. Lieb then pushes a boost button when exiting turns for the high-tech equivalent of a nitrous-oxide jolt, while monitoring a gauge that shows how much electric assist is left. The driver said that a hybrid battery wouldn’t work in the racecar, largely because the stresses of such rapid-fire charging and discharging would wreck a battery after only a few laps.

In addition to a performance and traction boost, the Porsche sips less high-octane racing fuel. As with the Le Mans-winning Audis, saving fuel is a winning race strategy, especially in long endurance races in which limiting fuel stops saves critical minutes. The goal at Nürburgring’s nearly 12-mile track, Mr. Lieb said, is to stay out one extra lap – making roughly nine circuits instead of eight – before having to pit for fuel.

A few days ago, Mr. Lieb, who also races Porsches in the American Le Mans Series, and two fellow drivers won the season opener of the Nürburgring Long Distance Championship, driving the conventional GT3 R. But the hybrid finished sixth in its inaugural race, an encouraging result for the factory team.

Mr. Lieb said the hybrid was still a bit slower on the track than the nonhybrid race version, as engineers seek to fully integrate the weight-adding hybrid system, a huge technical undertaking.

Click the title for the source