Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 ePerformance 2022 Shotgun Review

So far, the 2022 Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 ePerformance prototype has cost Porsche tens of millions of dollars, euros, yen, yuan and pounds, but no amount of money will buy it off them.

There are plans for future 2025 Porsche Cayman and Boxster sports cars to be full EVs, though, and a lot of the ideas in the prototype track car are applicable to the road-going cousins.

But it costs about $US350,000 to run a full season of Porsche’s Carrera Cup in Europe, and Porsche’s ambition is that the eventual EV equivalent of that series should be about line-ball with the combustion-powered championship.

So, one day in the middle distance, about $US350,000 is the rough figure.

The other, more road-relevant piece of the puzzle is that the next Porsche Cayman and Boxster will be electric cars, and this prototype is a piece of their development puzzle, particularly with a focus on regeneration to boost the range of relatively small batteries.

There are no luxuries in a 2022 Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 ePerformance prototype. If it doesn’t make it go quicker, stay stronger or prove its point, then it just isn’t in here.

There is a driver’s seat, which is a fixed carbon-fibre shell, a removable steering wheel and an optional passenger seat that leaves any guests with their legs up and their feet above their hip points, like in a Formula 1 car.

There is no gear lever or clutch pedal. The Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 ePerformance is a pure two-pedal car, with one for going and one for stopping, and that’s it.

Anchor: Safety & Technology

Porsche wanted to make the 2022 Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 ePerformance prototype close enough to a production race-spec car as it could, and that includes not getting anybody either hurt in crashes or zapped trying to emerge from them.

Porsche makes you prove you can clamber, twist, bump and wriggle yourself out of the scaffolding and escape via a backwards leap before you’re even allowed to go for a ride in its prototype.

Pencilled in as either a Porsche Carrera Cup replacement or a supplement, the prototype is built to show off electric series racing, and any demonstration is prefaced by an eye-popping safety briefing.

While it doesn’t mention hearing loss, and it doesn’t mention that you should probably bolt your innards in place before you strap in, it does mention a lot of scary stuff.

The bit that gets everybody’s attention is the all-wheel drive racer runs a 900V electrical system, and it has three battery packs, including directly under the passenger’s legs.

The safety briefing includes what to do when the indication lights are this colour, what do to when they’re that colour and, keenly, what to do if there’s a “thermal runaway” or, in English, a “battery fire”.

Stay in the car if it’s live, get out ASAP in whatever way is fastest if it’s on fire and, if you have to emerge from a damaged car, only do it with a jump, so you never touch the car and the ground at the same time…

…Because that’d be shockingly bad for you.

So far, the breakthroughs with the 2022 Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 ePerformance include a new coolant from Mobil that keeps battery performance constant throughout a race, new greener tyres and a massive boost in braking regeneration.

But all this, combined with 800kW of power and well over 1000Nm of torque, has to be paid for, hence the customer racing program will come before a road-going production version.

It looks like a Cayman Clubsport from certain angles, except the updated bodywork is in carbon-fibre, and it’s 140mm wider to hide the eco-friendly Michelin race rubber.

Porsche is using the program to see what works, what doesn’t, and just what an acceptable battery capacity (range) versus weight argument should look like.

It takes the Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 Clubsport and adds 6000 redesigned parts, some in carbon-fibre, others in synthetic materials and still more in recycled carbon-fibre – and even others in natural fibre composites.

In an age of the skateboard layout, with a big, flat battery in the middle and everything else attached at either end, the 2022 Porsche Cayman GT4 ePerformance is an orphan.

Porsche has squeezed in batteries everywhere, because there’s no pre-engineered space under the floor in the converted Cayman.

There is a battery pack in the nose, where the Cayman fuel tank would normally be, there’s one under the passenger’s calves and a third in the back, in place of the Cayman’s usual combustion engine.

Pro tip: Porsche is leaning towards smaller batteries for less weight, and relying on regeneration to eke out the range.

“Most road EVs, even the fast ones, can regenerate their braking energy at about three per cent. We regenerate at 50 per cent,” project manager Björn Förster insisted.

“That’s why we have a 900-volt system and that means we can run smaller batteries for less weight.

“It effectively means for every two we use, we get one back for free.”

To emphasise the point, most big-money EVs these days run battery packs at around 100kWh, but the 2022 Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 ePerformance prototype runs to 80kWh (65kW net) of charge.

There’s about half an hour of range in its race mode, which sees the power output turned down do 450kW, but torque remains astonishingly high, and Porsche insists the 900V system means it can charge from five to 80 per cent in just 15 minutes, at up to 350kW.

“There is no thermal degradation at all. As long as there is power in the battery you can choose any mode and drive it until it’s empty,” Förster said.

“We don’t have to reduce the performance of any part because it gets hot, because it doesn’t get hot,” he claimed.

The new coolant fluid, developed by Mobil, can work the other way to preheat the battery as well, and is destined for work in road-going Porsche models.

It’s immersive, leading to higher electrical power and greater battery longevity, even with far higher levels of regeneration under braking.

It even has new coolant developments for the power electronics brain, and the electric motors.

The rest of the car is pulled from the existing Carrera Cup 911 racers, so some of it fits only passingly (the front wheel hubs stick out beyond the arches, for example).

While we don’t know what the 2022 Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 ePerformance prototype is like to drive, we do know what it’s like to be driven in, and it’s brutal.

You know how some electric cars can slip past you so quietly you don’t notice them?

Yeah, the Porsche Cayman GT4 ePerformance isn’t like that.

It might start up with a menacing, tuneless hum, and it might roll out of the pit lane with a pitch incline, but its true nature emerges as soon as the pit lane ends.

And then it explodes, with everything happening everywhere, all at once, with sensations clambering over each other to overwhelm you.

The main battle is between the noise from the two electric motors and the effect from the two electric motors.

Even with the car in its detuned 450kW racing mode, the Cayman is a straight-line brute of a thing, pulverising you into the back of the seat as the driver mashes the throttle pedal.

Its rolling acceleration the likes of which only come in hypercar-country, up in the Bugatti Chiron region, and it never seems to end.

The short straights of the Porsche Experience Centre outside the Italian village of Franciacorta are destroyed in seconds, with the Cayman bursting to 240km/h like it has a bone to pick with the braking area.

The brakes themselves are stupendously strong, as you’d expect of a Carrera Cup braking package combined with the regenerative power of the front electric motor.

Our driver brakes very late, and very hard, and all the way in to the apex, rather than the Carrera Cup style of braking, then turning in and nailing the throttle as soon as possible.

He fights the steering, stabbing at it repeatedly, and I could feel him modulating the brake pedal trying to wrangle the 1542kg of weight until it grabbed the apex.

But that all calmed down as soon as the nose was where he wanted it, and his hands calmed down again as soon as he picked up the throttle.

Mostly a rear-driver, most of the time, the all-wheel drive Cayman uses its rear motor for drive and the front one mostly to help it pull out of bends, which it does frighteningly well.

But it all fades into the background compared to the noise. While the acceleration hammers most of your organs, the sound from the two motors attacks the ones on the side of your head.

It’s a shriek, like nothing in nature, and the initial hints of it in the pit lane turn into a full-blooded assault on the main straight.

I’ve stood under jet liners that were quieter, and while it’s loud from outside the car, it’s saturating from inside.

It’s made more odd by the car’s lack of accompanying vibrations from the powertrain through the seats or the floor, unlike a standard racer, so it’s as though it finds a way to isolate your ears from the rest of your body, then attacks them.

Sure, it doesn’t have the agility or the purity of the Carrera Cup 911, but it achieves the same lap times, albeit in very different ways.

Where the 911 is all mid-corner speed and delicacy, the electric Cayman is wrestling on corner entry and sheer acceleration on the way out.

There may be a time coming that will dictate this sort of car as the only socially acceptable way to go racing, and for many people that will be okay.

For sure, the 2022 Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 ePerformance won’t lose anything in lap times, and it will deliver drivers and teams a different way to think about lap speed.

Similar lap times will be arrived at in very different ways, and what the Cayman GT4 EV loses in cornering delicacy and poise, it makes up for in brutality, stability and sheer back-bending acceleration out of corners.

It even has the noise thing down pat.

That said, it lacks linearity, like the best combustion-powered one-make racers, and it lacks driving purity.

But then, it is only a prototype.

2022 Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 ePerformance at a glance:
Price: To be confirmed
Available: 2024/25, but not in this form
Powertrain: Two permanent magnet synchronous motors
Output: 800kW/1000Nm-plus
Transmission: Single-speed reduction gear
Battery: 80Wh lithium-ion
Range: 30 minutes of racing
Energy consumption: To be confirmed
Safety rating: Not tested