There are more YouTube channels doing drag races these days than there are stars in the sky at night (even if you can’t see them due to light pollution, trust us, they’re still there). However, few of them have the habit of delivering the most hotly anticipated heat-to-heads of the moment like Brooks Weisblat’s DragTimes does.
It’s not just the cars involved, but also the production value. The races will always take place at a prepped drag strip with proper timing gear, and we will get all the relevant information – stuff like tires or charging state if we’re talking about electric cars. Well, today we are talking about EVs, and it’s actually the two best ones you can currently buy.
We’ll start with the Taycan, which, not that long ago, was the newcomer that rocked the Model S’ boat by beating in over the quarter mile. Now, though, it has to defend its title in front of the same Tesla Model S – not the same-same, that would be boring, but you get what we mean. Tesla has upgraded the electric motors in the S as well as adding a third and called the new vehicle the Plaid. The unique configuration gives the sedan a total power output of 1,020 hp which makes the 761 hp produced by the Porsche suddenly seem puny.
Oh, it’ll do more than that once the races start, though the first one takes us a little by surprise. The Plaid wins it, and comfortably, but the Taycan strangely manages to keep up for the first two seconds or so. The Model S manages an unlikely 9.673 seconds run, but even before seeing the timeslip, Brooks’ experience tells him something was off. Indeed, the Tesla wasn’t in “Drag Strip” mode.
Even this toned-down exhibition of the Plaid’s performance is enough to have the Taycan owner order one on his phone on the side of the drag strip. That’s not a good look for Porsche.
The second run brings unusually poor reactions from Brooks in the Taycan (0.780), so the race looks even worse than it should for the Porsche. If we were to guess, we’d say Brooks probably doesn’t like racing when he knows there is no chance of winning, so the motivation is gone. Either way, he gets a 10.393 second run at 130 mph, which was almost exactly one second and 20 mph slower than Tesla’s result.
The third race seems like a carbon copy of the second – that’s what you get with these electric cars, unbelievable consistency. Sadly, the Taycan once again dawdles on the line (well, it gets a 0.338 reaction time, but compared to the Tesla’s 0.031, that’s an eternity), so the visual gap is once again huge. Just like the one on the time slip (though it’s under a second this time).
The result was never in doubt, but the race between these two had to happen. It looks like Tesla is working on the Taycan’s Nürburgring record as well, so we might be witnessing a double swoop that sees the Porsche lose both of its titles in quick succession. Whether the Germans fight back or not, remains to be seen, but the fact that Rimac is now officially part of the company suggests we might see a lot faster electric cars from Porsche in the future.
"Boy meets car, boy loves car, boy gets journalism degree and starts job writing and editing at a car magazine" - 5/5. (Vlad Mitrache if he was a movie) Full profile
Would you like AUTOEVOLUTION to send you notifications?
Google News