tesla supercharger nurburgring
Michael Taylor25 Sept 2019
NEWS

Tesla's Nürburgring misadventure

Elon Musk sent his team to the Green Hell to beat the Porsche Taycan’s lap time. And it unraveled from there

Porsche considers the Nürburging to be its spiritual home. No piece of blacktop is more sacred to it.

Last month, Tesla saw the Porsche Taycan set a new EV lap record there and thought “Me, too!”, although it had reportedly planned its Green Hell assault before that.

For all its talk about its mission of transitioning the world into clean electricity, Tesla and its ardent followers have been even crueler to EVs from legacy car-makers than they have been on their internal-combustion models.

Tame “independent” sites like Electrek and InsideEVs have slammed everything from the Audi e-tron to the Hyundai Kona Electric and everything in between, so they cheered when Musk announced he was sending cars to the ‘Ring.

They cheered even louder when he announced he’d beaten the Taycan’s ‘Ring lap time. They cheered so loudly, in fact, that they never cared to research the statements.

Because those statements of ‘Ring records from Tesla were mostly false, for a whole bunch of reasons.

Porsche’s 962 sports car held the outright lap record at the Nürburgring for more than 30 years and, when it looked under threat, Porsche sent the semi-race 919 Evo to lock it down even tighter.

Its factory-supported Manthey racing outfit is based there and has its own facility for testing, which is does to destruction to hone and validate its new models.

There’s no question Porsche also sees the ‘Ring as a marketing tool, to be shared among the Volkswagen Group’s fast cars. In the last few years it has alternated officially-sanctioned fastest production-car laps with sister brand, Lamborghini.

And so it naturally posted a lap time, complete with video, of its electric Taycan, though the “electric four-door” record was not something recognised by the Nürburgring itself.

All that led to Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s tweet that there would be a “Model S on Nürburgring next week”.

It sparked speculation that the Taycan time had triggered Tesla and in particular Musk, and that the company employed time-honoured Silicon Valley tradition to “hackathon” its way to a new record.

Now, to be clear, Musk never said the Model S was being flown over specifically to break the Taycan’s lap time (which, itself, wasn’t an official record, remember).

That didn’t stop the usual Branch Elonians from assuming that’s what he meant. At least, that’s what they assumed and shouted until it became clear that it wouldn’t be happening, and then they backtracked very quickly, before claiming a victory that only came in theory.

It unfolded in a timeline of one of the strangest weeks in the history of the very grown-up automotive industry.

Firstly, Nico Rosberg stuck his hand up by replying “Give me a call if you need a decent driver to do the lap!” on Twitter. Musk accepted the offer with glee.

Besides making it crystal clear that a Porsche-beating lap time was the entire reason for the trip, it raised another very significant point. Rosberg, 2016 Formula 1 world champion or not, wasn’t licenced to run hot laps of the Nürburgring because...

...It very quickly became obvious that Tesla had somehow overlooked the obvious and had neglected to ask the Nürburgring if it could pop over.

Now, the Nürburgring is booked solid every year and it welcomed Tesla to join the official industry test days, or it could drive during the tourist laps along with any crazy German in a road car.

What it couldn’t do was have the track to itself, open and free. It couldn’t run an officially timed lap at all, because a) timed laps aren’t permitted on industry days and b) all industry days require the cars to be driven through the pits at the end of each lap, cutting about 1.8km out of the full lap.

Eventually, Tesla wrangled half an hour of costly full circuit time out of the Nürburgring’s managers but, as the timeline unfolds, Tesla never used it to set a time because by then both of its Model S prototypes had broken badly enough that they couldn’t be repaired locally.

One of the prototypes, running on expired Californian number plates, was actually bought back by Tesla under Lemon Laws.

Musk’s supporters didn’t care, though. They painted it as a production Tesla Model S taking on the might of Porsche at its spiritual home.

Home truths

But it wasn’t that at all. Taking on the lap time set by Porsche’s Taycan Turbo (not, it should be said, the faster Turbo S) were a pair of Tesla Model S “Plaid” prototypes.

That meant neither of the cars would be in production for at least a year and both of them had three electric motors (the standard Model S and Taycan have two) for higher performance.

Also, Musk insisted the “Model S at Nürburgring has seven seats”. Eye-witnesses and photographers insisted the Model S prototypes at the Nürburgring had just one seat, which seems like a ludicrous thing to lie about.

The cars were stripped out, with wider tracks and updated suspension, bigger air intakes and even a Lexan spoiler attached to the rear-end to add downforce.

Nobody outside an inner circle at Tesla knows how much of the stock battery pack they were running (to save weight), or what the output of the three motors was.

These weren’t roll-off-the-line pre-production models, like the Taycan. They were full go-fast prototypes, built just to set a record. Which it couldn’t set anyway because of the above reasons...

The Model S mules were reality distortions rather than record breakers, complete with Goodyear F1 Supercar 3R track-day tyres, worth between 15 and 20 seconds a lap on the Nürburgring alone, and much wider than the standard Model S tyres.

Standard Model S tyres are 245/35 R21 at the front and 265/35 R21 at the rear. The prototypes on the ‘Ring ran a minimum of 275/35 ZR21 and a maximum of 325/30 ZR21 in both Goodyear and Michelin’s Sport Cup 2 tyres.

The Taycan time was set on its standard production tyres.

Then Tesla claimed to have set a time nearly 20 seconds faster than the Taycan’s, but that wasn’t the case.

Certainly, the official timers on the Nürburgring didn’t think so and still haven’t posted the claimed 7:23 lap (nearly 20sec faster than the Taycan’s 7:42) on the official timing page, for good reason.

Firstly, the lap time claim was hand timed by “an observer” and “leaked” by Tesla. Secondly, where the Taycan did a full lap of the Nürburgring’s Nordschleife loop, the Tesla claim neatly cut out almost 2km of it by running through the pits and claiming a “bridge to gantry” time instead.

While that was enough to have Tesla fans (and other folks who just skimmed over the details) frothing at the mouth for Elon defending Tesla’s EV-pinnacle status, it didn’t take a lot of closer inspection to poke holes in it.

For starters, there was Tesla’s claim that it had fitted two of its superchargers at the Nürburgring to help the effort and it planned to leave them there for other Tesla fans to use.

The two superchargers arrived (and remained) on plastic pallets, charged Elon’s prototypes using a diesel generator and were deactivated again on September 19, the day after Tesla left. Where they are now is anybody’s guess, but they’re not at the ‘Ring anymore.

The two Teslas did a lot of circulating on the industry days, but flat-out driving to set lap times was more difficult. First one, then (famously, with a Taycan driving past it) the second Model S died.

The second, faster Model S had to be craned on to the MAN (part of the Volkswagen Group) truck because it wouldn’t roll.

Then it was towed away from the track by a Volkswagen Touareg diesel, because European Model X SUVs can only tow 2268kg (or 1580kg when they wear 20-inch wheels), while the Touareg can manage 3500kg.

Pivoting away from insisting it had run an outright record, Tesla then tweeted: “Data from our track tests indicates that Model S Plaid can achieve 7:20 at the Nürburgring”.

Called on it by industry experts (but praised by its faithful), Tesla doubled down, insisting it could even pull that time down to 7:05 “with some improvements”.

Then it claimed the promised Roadster could even break the Porsche 919 Evo’s outright track record, jumping straight past the Volkswagen ID.R Pikes Peak racer’s time.

So, just like most other steps forward claimed by Tesla, there’s enough in it to satisfy its more ardent fans, but so many holes in it that skeptics have no alternative but to call bullshit.

The Nürburgring is a tough place to master and Tesla deserves respect just for turning up.

But when people realise it turned up with a trust-me-boys special to beat a production-car time, still didn’t manage to do it but claimed victory anyway, all that respect may just ebb away again.

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Written byMichael Taylor
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