Cars with Jan Coomans. Porsche Taycan (and friends) on lake Baikal

Former racing driver Oleg Kesselman and his team, who run Porsche’s driving experience in Russia, deserve a mention as they spent many days out on the ice where even a thick coat doesn’t entirely shield you from the elements. They had laid out six different courses with the usual collection of bright orange plastic cones and scored a 10/10 in my book for the creative effort as the shapes of the tracks they came up were pretty unusual to say the least. There was to be lots of slow speed drifting around seemingly endless cones, but also some slightly faster stuff which felt pretty exciting in cars that can pick up straight line speed as quickly as these. All cars were fitted with absolutely superb Michelin X-ice studded tires, which generated pretty serious amounts on grip on a surface which was so slippery that it was a real challenge just to stay upright on your own two feet.

While there were a good bunch of Taycans on hand in 4S, Turbo and Turbo S spec (I believe I counted 8 in total) only half of them could be used at any one time while the others were being charged. Being in this remote location, charging took a while, so each car was used for half of the day and then swapped out with 30-40% battery charge remaining. If that sounds like a limited range, let’s have a reality check. The cars had to keep us and themselves warm in −23 degrees while constantly spinning their wheels pirouetting across the frozen expanse with no opportunity for recuperating much energy under braking. The fact that they could do that for several hours and have a good amount of juice left is nothing short of amazing. Plus, even the petrol cars that were there in the form of the latest generation 911 easily went through half a tank of regular fuel in a couple of hours.

Truth be told, I did spend a rather large amount of time driving the various 911s which were on site namely the Carrera 4S, Targa 4S Heritage Edition and the Turbo S. Mostly this was because the “serious” car journalists were swarming over the Taycans, but I was quite happy to enjoy myself in the regular sports cars in the meantime. There’s something about those Porsches that makes them extremely natural for me to drive, as if they’re wirelessly connected directly to my brain. I wasn’t learning anything particularly new this way, but boy did I have a good time. When I finally swapped to a Taycan, the driving took a lot more thinking on my part because it really is a very different type of machine to slide around. The immediacy of the power delivery is a huge advantage when you’re drifting, but when you’ve been driving traditional cars for decades, you’ve become used to compensating for their relative deficiencies and adjusting to the new reality that is the Taycan takes time and plenty of practice. It’s a different game, with similar rules but where your actions have slightly different consequences than you’re expecting.

All that is a long way of saying that I struggled a little to drive the Taycan intuitively. Which had not been the case at all when I tested the car on a dry Moscow Raceway. Its low centre of gravity and perfect weight distribution make it agile and super stable, but this can work against you when you’re trying to use the pendulum effect to swing the back of the car around in the way that you would in a 911. With the Taycan, the main way to induce oversteer is simply by pressing the throttle. If you give the right pedal a good stab, the rear will step out immediately. But you then have to follow that up immediately with more bursts of the throttle or the car will straighten itself out — much quicker than the more traditional cars would. Getting it right required considerable concentration, but the results when you tame the Taycan are mighty impressive. There is no doubt in my mind that electric drivetrains could become vastly superior for this “Gymkhana” style of driving. Or basically rallying for that matter.

But that’s not to say that the Taycan was the fastest car around this course. We had a little competition where all 6 exercises got linked to create a nearly 5-minute long ice track of sorts. On that, I was 15 seconds quicker in the Carrera 4S than the Taycan Turbo S. How do I explain that when I’ve just sung the praises of electrified drifting? Well, there is the small issue of weight. Except that it’s not small. A Taycan weighs about nine hundred kilograms more than an all-wheel-drive 911. Nine hundred! I actually found this figure staggering as the superior agility of the Taycan would completely fool you into thinking that it wasn’t heavy at all. It is, but all that extra heft sits very low and between the axles. So it doesn’t have the usual drawbacks on the car’s handling, but there are still moments when all that mass is working against you. Actually, the only time I really noticed it was when trying to accelerate out of turns. The grip available to the tires to transfer engine power onto ice is simply limited, making it impossible to use all of the car’s power. Thus, accelerating the heavier mass took more time and longer spinning of the wheels than the lighter mass. It would’ve been much the same story if we had used a fossil-fuelled Panamera instead.

Interestingly, I set my best time in the 911 Carrera 4S rather than the Turbo S though not by a huge amount. About 1.5 seconds separated them, which on a course this long and with plentiful opportunities for driving error is almost negligible. Still, I believe the softer suspension of the 4S had a small advantage over the rather stiffly sprung Turbo S in this unusual environment. The yellow monster (911 Turbo S) was definitely a bit less forgiving to drive as well — I had quite a few spins in it while trying to find out just how quickly it would go — which doesn’t help one’s confidence. For once though, my comfort and experience with going fast in Porsches paid off as I set the quickest Taycan time by a number of seconds and even managed to grab the outright track record in the 911 among all journalists of the 4 groups which visited. I wasn’t not going to mention that! After all, I’ve been more than happy to share with you guys all the times I actually lost. Anyway, I must credit my victory to the fact that I didn’t actually know I was being timed. I figured we were still just practicing.

As is the case with all of the best press trips, this was basically an exercise in having as much fun as possible under the guise of performing serious car journalism. I mean, we’re not really going to be able to give you an unexpected conclusion here I’m afraid. Of course the Taycan is amazing to drive even on a stage as unlikely as a vast pool of frozen water. And the 911 is still as good as ever, possibly better. I do apologise for the lack of unexpected twists. In the end, this was a tour de force of sheer awesomeness. Pushing the boundaries of just how cool (literally as well as figuratively) a car test can be. It’ll be a tough one to top — so long as it remains technically impossible to send us and some cars to the moon, at least.