Porsche started 2024 in grand style, taking the checkered flag at the 23-hour-58-minute-and-24-second Daytona race a few days ago. For all those wandering what in the time-measuring heaven has struck my keyboard: the race was cut short 95.277 seconds before the actual finish time of 24 hours due to an ‘officiating error.’ It was a momentous victory for the German carmaker, its 23rd overall win at Daytona.
Even more so for Roger Penske, who last won the famous event in 1969 with Mark Donohue in a Lola Chevrolet. Porsche’s last time taking the crown was 14 years ago, in 2010, so this win couldn’t have come at a better moment for the Porsche Penske Motorsport team. The Porsche 923 hybrid secured victory after an intense battle against a Cadillac V-LMDh. The red-and-white racecar blitzed the track and wrote history and possibly the future.
Races have served as a development base for carmakers since day one, and Porsche is no stranger to this practice. Some of the brand’s most reputed nameplates have deep roots in the fast-paced speed trials worldwide. Curiously, the Germans haven’t jumped the gun on grafting race tech into street models. The renowned Rearing Horse House of Speed from Stuttgart acknowledges only five performance peaks in its glorious history.
Five hypercars, to be precise, starting with the fabled 959 from the mid-80s and ending with the Mission X concept revealed last fall. The 911 GT1 Strassenversion, the Carrera GT, and the 918 Spyder are the other three – in order of appearance. The latest proposal, Mission X, naturally embraces the switch from the historical piston-driven firepower to the age of electrons.
Photo: Instagram/@zackx429
Like its predecessors, the full-electric concept hypercar has yet to become a palpable machine ready to break speed records. Still, for now, it serves as inspiration for an imaginative alternative. Courtesy of a digital artist from Pasadena, California – Zack Fu (riding his pixel-errant horsepowers under the zackx429 social media coat of arms), a vision of Porsche’s future hypercar has emerged from the depths of digital car design.
His creation is the Mission B Concept, an all-electric missile that’s equally at home on the track or the street. Or, in the artist’s words, ‘Aims to strike a perfect balance between leisure and work.’ His idea is a two-seater with gullwing doors, a split windshield, electric motors on both axles and active aerodynamics. Sounds familiar?
The no-nonsense Porsche Mission B sits on a 106-inch wheelbase (2.7 meters). Its highest above-ground point is 43.3 inches over the tarmac. Still, the bullet-shaped speed demon is over 86 inches wide (2.2 meters). And that doesn’t account for the side mirrors, mainly because there aren’t. It’s a hypercar – even if only in imagination – so it probably uses cameras. Either that or the drivers of the future are clairvoyants who don’t need to look (with the eyes!) to see what’s around them.
Photo: Instagram/@zackx429
Discrete vertical stabilizers, air diffusers, and concealed inverted wings should keep the Mission B glued to the tarmac, particularly in corners. The air-bending theme is omnipresent in the car’s overall profile, from the rear-oriented air vents for the wheel arches – to get rid of the excess pressure created by the superfast-spinning wheels – to its fighter-jet-like cockpit.
The vertical front lights directly hint at the Mission X concept car, but the rear is a deja vu experience altogether. But, unlike Porsche’s designers, the car visualist from California preferred a more driver-focused cockpit with an unobstructed lateral field of view. The A-pillars are removed, and a central vertical splitter halves the windshield, very much like present Formula One cars.
After nearly two decades in news television, Răzvan turned to a different medium. He’s been a field journalist, a TV producer, and a seafarer but found that he feels right at home among petrolheads. Full profile
Would you like AUTOEVOLUTION to send you notifications?
Google News