Porsche Unveils 911 Hybrid With Flywheel Booster

MikeChino writes "Porsche has just unveiled its 911 GT3 R Hybrid, a 480 horsepower track vehicle ready to rock the 24-hour Nurburgring race this May. Porsche's latest supercar will use the same 911 production platform available to consumers today, with a few race-ready features including front-wheel hybrid drive and an innovative flywheel system that stores kinetic energy from braking and then uses it to provide a 160 horsepower burst of speed. The setup is sure to offer an advantage when powering out of turns and passing by other racers."

Gyroscopic effect?

[nicknamenotavailable]

Flywheels have been used to store energy for ages, but do they change the handling of the car at all?
Boats can have gyroscopic roll stabilizers, but what effect does this flywheel have?

sounds familiar

[Trepidity]

Hybrid-drivetrain racecar with a flywheel sounds a lot like this 1994 car [google.com].

Re:Gyroscopic effect?

[DieByWire]

...but do they change the handling of the car at all?

Counter-rotating flywheels (and/or orienting the flywheel axis vertically) would probably minimize the precession effects. Weight distribution and complexity are probably larger factors.

safety ?

[Anonymous Coward]

ok, so we have lets say 100 kg flywheel rotating at 40,000 rpm.
and we crash.
something hits the flywheel, likely destroying bearings as well.
what will happen ?

I'm not sure, but I don't think this will end good.

did you heard about lightened and not properly balanced engine flywheels ? I did. they could explode, and in cars with transverse engine layout shrapnels could even kill the driver.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSFA0ufNS_k

Re:I want 2!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Or 1910s era cool!
http://www.dself.dsl.pipex.com/MUSEUM/TRANSPORT/gyrocars/schilovs.htm [pipex.com]

Re:Gyroscopic effect?

[i.r.id10t]

No worse than letting your foot off the gas a little in the corner with a rear-engine rear wheel drive car...

Not done it in a 911 of any vintage, but in a 356 it gets kinda interesting for a few seconds ...

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:What?

[tompaulco]

Whenever I see somebody doing a burnout, I always feel bad for them because their poor tires are not properly matched to their car. After all, with a properly matched tire set, if you tromp the gas, the car goes fast. I love embarassing ignorant rednecks in their hopped up Camaros by beating them for the first couple of hundred yards in my all wheel drive GMC Safari minivan while they sit their and spin their wheels like idiots. They don't seem to realize that they can only beat me once their wheels stop spinning. They think that their inability to maintain traction is some sort of advantage.

Re:Hello? News for NERDS.

[ukemike]

Though the common computer nerd is the most high profile and widely recognized nerd, there are in fact many varieties of nerds found in the wild. Today we will feature the mechanical engineer. The ME once dominated the high tech world creating turbines, fighter jets, and space rockets. Today it is common to find an odd crossbreed of the ME nerd and the car geek. This type of nerd stands out in several important ways. The mechanical engineer / car geek, often displays impressive social skills when compared to the meager skills of the computer nerd. ME's consider computers to be a means to an end instead of the end itself. One other common characteristic of the ME nerd / car geek is that he typically considered the various iterations of the Porsche 911 to be the very pinnacles of industrial design.

Re:Mass would be a problem

[eagle8635]

That's true, and why I personally think hybrid sports cars don't generally make a great deal of sense. However, from what I've been able to find, the Porsche system is apparently lighter than the equivalent battery-based hybrid system, and in a 24 hour endurance race like the one this car will be competing in, efficiency becomes really important, probably more so than being able to overtake in the corners. That's one of the reasons diesel cars do so well at LeMans, even though many of the gasoline-powered cars can corner faster, over the course of 24 hours the efficiency and straight line speed advantages allow them to win.

Re:advantage

[CdBee]

Maybe they have 2 counter-rotating flywheels