Yahoo Autos 2025 Porsche Taycan GT First Drive Review: 'Holy hell!'
SEVILLE, Spain – Left foot firmly on the brake, right foot stomped on the accelerator to the floor. Launch control confirmed in the gauges and I slip my left foot off the brake pedal. I'm pinned to the seat like my young nephew the first time I took him on the Disneyland tea cup centrifuge. The outside world turns into a blurred impressionist landscape as I let out a guttural chuckle and a few choice expletives just as I reach the end of the straightaway at Circuito Monteblanco outside of Seville.
Okay, that's pretty great, but I've felt the same gut punch in other ridiculous electric vehicles. What else can this range-topping Porsche Taycan Turbo GT do? A whole lot, it turns out.
Trying my best to stay tucked behind the lead pro driver on track, I nudge the steering wheel into the next curve and this nearly 5,000-pound sedan complies without any protest or drama. In the next bend, I push just a bit harder and it feels as though my gut is struggling more than the Taycan's chassis. The lead driver pulls away by a few car lengths, so I tap the steering wheel button to engage Attack Mode and slowly reduce the gap. It's not as though I lit a JATO rocket in the trunk, rather, it gives you just a wee bit more power for 10 seconds. It's more like how you get to the L-M-N-O-P section when singing the alphabet.
Hard on the ceramic composite brakes, and I hear the fat tires chirping on the pavement. Trailing off the pedal, I coax the front tires toward the next apex and feel only the slightest of shimmies before I lay back into the skinny pedal. The synthetic sounds pouring from the speakers add to the theater as I rinse and repeat for the rest of my allotted laps.
"Holy hell," I murmur to myself as I clumsily extract myself from the driver's seat. I'm sweating like a 1980s standup comedian even though it's heavy-jacket weather in Southern Spain. But it's not over.
I stumble over to the upgrade: the Taycan Turbo GT with the Weissach Package. This purple cherry on top ditches the rear seats – leaving a storage compartment in its place – and bolts a fixed carbon fiber wing to the trunk lid, among other tweaks and feature deletes. The kicker is the shoes it's wearing on the 21-inch forged wheels: a set of bespoke Pirelli P Zero Trofeo RS tires that are essentially street-legal slicks with a hint of tread pattern.
Unlike the Pirelli P Zero Rs on the "regular" Turbo GT, these Trofeo RS tires never uttered a single peep when cornering. They just stick. No squirm, no shimmy, and I'm having a much easier time keeping up with the pro driver in his non-Weissach Taycan Turbo GT. Even with this new-found confidence, I'm cautiously trying to rail through a moderate right curve that leads over a blind crest without chickening out by brushing the brakes.
Nope. No way. I chose discretion over valor and had a bitter taste of self-disappointment as I began to unwind the wheel and realized I still had half a car width between the outside wheels and the rumble strips. Too late, sadly, as the radio crackles to tell me it's time for a cool-down lap on the way back to the pits and reality.
