I haven’t been back since my first visit in 2014, but up in the alien spacecraft that sits high above Porsche’s Leipzig plant there used to be a naked Carrera GT. No doors, no roof, not a single body panel, its modesty so long gone it almost seemed rude to look. But you couldn’t help yourself.
It was all on display – the inboard suspension, the shapely, almost organic forms of the carbon fibre monocoque and rear subframe that curve and twist this way and that, the wheels shoved out to each corner like a beach buggy, and right in the middle of it all, that sensational V10.
You gawp at it for a while, then think what a terrible shame it was that Porsche ever chose to fit a body to the Carrera GT at all. It just looks better, more dramatic and so much more fun without one. I haven’t investigated the realities of driving an unclothed Carrera GT on the highway, but when I buy mine, even before I’ve driven home, I will remove the bumpers, the doors, the wings, the upper clamshell, the front bonnet and anything else that obscures the weird, skeletal beauty that lies beneath.
And the EVR? I didn’t quite think the same when I saw it at rest in the race bay at Williams Advanced Engineering, but I was at least reminded of that undressed Carrera GT. The EVR looks low and squat, too, its carbon monocoque a thing of some elegance, and so too the front and rear subframes made of aluminium castings and extrusions, the springs and dampers mounted inboard, the motors visible at the rear and the vast battery stack nestling behind the cockpit where on the Porsche you find one of the great engines.
