I’m still hyperventilating. Haven’t quite recovered from the shock. Am I dreaming? If so wake me up. First, a little background info.

I’m a big Porsche fan. One of the real nutters. I guess it can all be traced back to that one game – Need For Speed : Porsche Unleashed. That game really got me hooked onto Porsches. Fine, I do appreciate all other kinds of cars, but I’ll always have a special place in my heart for Porsches.

Porsche 918

That special place in my heart just may have caused a major cardiac arrest. I mean, just look at it. It’s the new Porsche 918, currently a near-production concept, spiritual successor to the Porsche Carrera GT, the limited production mid-engined supercar.

The Carrera GT was originally meant to be a prototype for a Le Mans racer, but somewhere along the way, it got transformed into the car we know today. A road going, all out supercar. Fine, so it’s quite slow, if you compare it with the supercars of today, like the Zonda, but in its time, along with the McLaren-Mercedes SLR, they were the fastest cars money could buy.

Firstly, it looks gorgeous. I mean, it’s a widely recognised and acknowledged fact that the people working in the design department of Porsche are among the laziest in the world. No matter how hard they try, each 911 looks almost exactly the same as the previous model. It’s like each time they’re instructed to design another body, they just doodle till the night before the deadline, and they hurriedly fish out last time’s blueprints and quickly make some meaningless squiggles, and carefully change a line or two, and rebrand it as a new car. Honestly, the design dept. at Porsche is possible the laziest in the whole world… And when Porsche does occasionally come up with a new car, it either looks hideously ugly (Cayenne), or just like a stretched kangaroo 911(Panamera), or a Boxter with a roof welded on (Cayman). But this looks utterly beautiful. Still recognisable for the Porsche it is, but at the same time, looking rather different from the rest of the range. As a result, this might be one of the first Porsches in a long, long time, that might be universally acknowledged as a pretty car.

What’s more, this supercar’s a hybrid, just like the Ferrari 599. Except, it’s more extreme. With a 3.4 litre V8 straight out of an American Le Mans racer, putting out 500 bhp, this car ought to be fast. What’s more, there are a couple of electric motors on the front axle, putting out another 200+ bhp, making the total effective power output over 700 bhp. Couple that with the fact that this weighs under 1.5 tonnes, and you’ve got yourselves a serious supercar… Can’t wait for this car to come out!

Tags: 918, Geneva, Hyrbid, Porsche