979 Horsepower Beat 3,000. Do the Math.

There's a Chinese EV with 3,000 horsepower. Porsche sent one with 979 and took its lunch.

That's not spin. That's the Nürburgring Nordschleife doing what it's always done — separating the number on the spec sheet from the car underneath the number. The Taycan Turbo GT with the Manthey kit, piloted by Porsche development driver Lars Kern, lapped the 12.94-mile circuit in 6:55.553. That's more than four seconds clear of the Yangwang U9 Xtreme's time. It's also 12 seconds faster than Kern's own previous record in the standard Taycan Turbo GT with Weissach Package, set in October 2023. Twelve seconds. On the same circuit. By the same driver. In essentially the same car, now wearing a different jacket.

That last detail matters more than people are giving it credit for.

The Manthey Effect

The Manthey kit pushes maximum output to 979 horsepower in what the car calls Attack Mode — a phrase that would sound ridiculous anywhere except a track where it is, in fact, the only mode worth caring about. But raw horsepower was never the story here. The Yangwang U9 Xtreme has three times that figure and it still couldn't hold the line.

What the Manthey kit actually does — beyond the power bump — is tune the car toward the track with the kind of specificity that comes from knowing the Nordschleife the way a surgeon knows an anatomy textbook. Manthey Racing knows that circuit. They've been shaping Porsches around it for years. The kit isn't a product so much as accumulated institutional knowledge expressed in hardware.

The Nürburgring is 12.94 miles of elevation change, camber shifts, blind crests, and corners that punish overconfidence with immediate and unambiguous feedback. It doesn't reward power in a straight line. It rewards balance, chassis compliance, brake management, and a setup that lets the driver push without spending the first half of every corner unwinding a mistake from the last one. Three thousand horsepower and a car that can't rotate properly through the Karussell is just a very expensive way to find the wall.

What the Four Seconds Mean

Electrek noted the Taycan's time is more than nine seconds faster than the previous record in the Electric Executive Cars category. Nine seconds on a circuit where a tenth of a second per corner compounds into something decisive — that's not an incremental improvement. That's a reframing of what an electric sedan is supposed to be capable of.

The coverage from The Drive framed it plainly: big power only gets you so far at the Green Hell. That framing is correct, and it's also the part that tends to get lost in the EV conversation, which remains weirdly fixated on horsepower figures the way early PC marketing was fixated on megahertz. The number is real. It's just not the whole story.

Porsche's argument — made not in a press release but in 6:55.553 of actual lap time — is that engineering coherence beats raw output. That a car developed with intention, tuned by people who understand the specific demands of a specific place, will outrun something with three times the power that hasn't been taught how to use it.

The Nürburgring has been making this argument for decades. The EV era just gave it a new proof.