TG24 19.00: Volkswagen ID.R vs Porsche 935

Words: Chris Harris // Photography: Richard Pardon

Actually, in a straight line, or at least from rest to 125mph, the leccy VW might have the legs on a current F1 car – it accelerates from standstill to 125mph in under five seconds. In the time your brain has acknowledged the violence of this 4WD-assisted mayhem and sent a strongly worded message to your voice box indicating that some kind of vernacular outburst might be in order, you’ve hit the 150mph speed limiter. And haven’t had the time to say the ‘K’. It’s the most accelerative car I’ve ever driven.

The most intimidating too. You enter through an access hatch in the roof and squidge down into the carbon tub. Cables and connectors that look the correct diameter for a power station sit a few inches from your right arm with warning stickers emblazoned with what look like men being fried. The cabin and steering wheel are littered with buttons and switches that mostly don’t apply to the occasional driver like me.

The ID.R starts by powering the low-voltage circuit, then waiting for the high-power circuit to prime, accompanied by a whoosh of cooling fans - after that you simply hit a button labelled ‘drive’. There is only one gear and two pedals.

The extraordinary thing about this car is that its most extraordinary attribute isn’t the startling speed delivered by 670bhp and 1,100kg. Nope, the cornering and braking are best described as nuts. The brake feel is uncanny – you can sense the pad gnawing into the carbon ceramic discs – and the grip from that combination of slick tyres and unprecedented levels of downforce is more than my neck could handle for more than two laps of Portimão. Fortunately the ID.R will only run three laps flat-out on a single charge, which saved me the embarrassment of squeezing back out of the roof and making some excuse about having a poorly back.

The internal combustion engine has no answer to the combination of instant EV torque and 4WD. It’s a violent level of performance – even if you know a circuit well, the straights are shrunken into brief squirts of power and you end up cursing yourself for braking too early – despite smashing the middle pedal 50 metres later than you’ve ever dared before.

High-speed cornering is from another dimension altogether. VW claims it will pull over 4g (more under braking) and, like anything with such possibilities, you marvel at how the thing generates more grip as speeds rise. There’s a massive undulating left-hander at Portimão – through it a McLaren P1 was just about flat-out at 120mph. The ID.R was travelling 25mph faster. Because the ID.R was intended to break the Pikes Peak record where speeds aren’t that high, drag isn’t an issue. So, instead of using clever underbody ground effect, VW just slapped on some massive wings that begin squeezing the body into the ground at much lower speed.

I was quite taken by the noise too, a wheeshing, ripping sound that somehow suits the relentless way this machine goes about breaking records at Pikes Peak and the Nürburgring. But what does an unlimited EV mission like this tell us about the future of motoring? It tells us that they will be fast – much faster than the fun-sponges who view this technology as the end of performance cars would ever want to countenance. And it confirms that range will be a serious limiting issue for some time to come. But you had to admire VW for making such an extreme machine.

In the presence of anything other than the ID.R, Porsche’s 935 would appear to be wearing an outrageous set of clothes, today it looks merely punchy.

The detailing is exquisite, though – all too often, a car company raids the back catalogue in the name of the bottom line and desecrates the memory of a past hero, but I find it hard to imagine how you could effectively rebody a GT2 RS to honour Porsche’s Seventies racing icon, the 935, and do a better job than it has with this. I was sniffy when I first saw it, but up close, it’s delicious – little details like the fillet of LED brake lights on the trailing uprights of the rear spoiler just make you smile at the obsession that so clearly went into making this car.

Does it drive like a GT2 RS on slicks? Unsurprisingly, yes. The traction advantage is immediately felt and the gearbox has been given a little extra zip – to the point that the shifts really are indistinguishable from a proper pneumatic race transmission. The noise is pure Porsche, with some extra volume thrown in because the 935 never has to be street-legal.

The Knight Rider steering wheel is a bit of a gimmick, but the rest of the cabin is, if you’re like me, a geek’s dream of Porsche motorsport readouts and repurposed GT road car switches. It’s trimmed and finished to a very high standard. The seat is a full race effort from a Carrera Cup car, but it still moves on a runner for convenience and the wheel has the full range of adjustment from the road car.

Do those wings generate any noticeable downforce? Not really. If you want a track Porsche 911 to bend your face above 100mph Manthey’s GT2 RS MR is a better bet, but my judgement might have been slightly skewed by the neck-pounding the ID.R had just meted out.

The 935 has power to satisfy anyone, the handling is mostly safe understeer, but 553lb ft of torque can alter that at any time. The GT2 RS’s vast carbon-ceramic brakes are more than up to the job of stopping the 935, and Porsche remains the master of giving non-steel brakes perfect pedal feel.

For me, the 935 is the retrospective Porsche that rights the wrongs of the sacrilegious decision to name the 4cyl Boxster the 718. Whoever allowed that to happen should be banned from Zuffenhausen for a few years. But that’s another story.

VW ID.R
Price: £God knows
Engine: electric motors, 670bhp, 479lb ft, AWD
Performance: 0–62mph in 2.25secs, 150mph
Weight: 1100kg
Power to weight: 609bhp/tonne

PORSCHE 935
Price: £750,000
Engine: 3.8TT, flat-six, 700bhp, 553lb ft, RWD
Performance: 0–62mph in 2.7secs, 211mph
Weight: 1380kg
Power to weight: 507bhp/tonne