Mission Critical

This is also the first car we’ve seen from design boss Sühlmann, whom Leiters recruited from McLaren in February. He clearly got the ‘make it a Porsche’ memo. The ‘torpedo’ front wings are pure Porsche, and you can see some 959 in the rear section of the roofline, and the GT1 in the flattish nose and the ‘car-in-car’ effect at the rear. The wheels reference the lovely dial design of the 928.

But while the influences are disparate, Sühlmann pulls it together into a coherent whole. The Mission S looks as you’d expect the 911 to had it gone upmarket and mid-engined years ago and evolved naturally from there. And there is much here that is entirely new: appropriate and necessary on a mid-engined supercar, but not a 911. The big but gently radiused front air intake leads into S ducts which puncture the front hood but play nicely with those torpedo fenders. There’s a subtle roof-mounted air intake pulling air backwards to the 917-style horizontal cooling fan mounted in the engine cover. Together, they might allow the Mission S to maintain flanks unadulterated by air intakes, though Sühlmann is at pains to remind us that this really is just a concept car, and the engineering work to come might dictate otherwise.

The pinched waist gives the Mission S a far more dramatic plan view than the 911, and greater visual variation as you walk around it. Some angles are better than others: the front three-quarters is less well resolved than the rear, which is just stunning: an artful collection of curves which reference the GT1 and Carrera GT but produce something entirely new and entirely Porsche. Sühlmann likes designs you can see into and through, and the grace of his radii contrast perfectly with the amount of 335-section rubber his design exposes: beauty and brutality in one angle.

His cockpit design is likely to influence future Porsches beyond whatever the Mission S becomes, and reflects the desire for simpler, more physical, analogue interfaces. The most obvious change is the lack of a central screen, replaced with your phone, held in place with a MagSafe connection. The classic Porsche five-dial instrument panel is physical, as is the needle on the central dial, but the displays are digital and you’ll be able to choose which era of 911 they recreate. They’re also mobile, with the rev counter motoring towards you in track mode and the others clustering behind. There are new push-pull organ-stop style controllers for the comfort and driving functions and a key holder to the left of the steering wheel, as in Porsches of old, even if you no longer need it to turn an ignition barrel. There are endless other details, but the best bit, for me, is the big red button under the steering boss, which kills all the electronic driving aids and is simply marked ‘on your own’. Let’s hope that makes it into production.

The Mission S looks so complete, so functional, and so production-ready it is almost impossible to believe that the entire project has been completed in six months. Sühlmann insists that it has. I ask him what was already on the drawing board when he arrived in February, and he just picks up and shows me a blank sheet of paper. I ask him if the production car has been signed off yet, and while he won’t answer, he also doesn’t say that it hasn’t. I try another way, asking if there’s anything on the Mission S that couldn’t make production, including that 917-style fan. Again, he won’t answer directly, but it’s pretty clear what we’ll get won’t be far removed from what we see here.

What we didn’t want is a spaceship,’ he says, ‘very cool, but not possible. The task from Michael was to give him a car that looks production, could be translated into a real car, could one day see the daylight. That’s why you see a lot of stuff in there that could be possible in the near future.’

Leiters himself is equally impossible to draw out on the engineering details of the car, which in turn would tell us just how far above the 911 it will sit. He is keen for us to refer to the Mission S as a ‘super sports car,’ and as neither a hypercar nor a successor to the 918, all of which implies that there might be such a car later. The production version of this car (don’t bother asking him about the name either) will not be limited in numbers. It will be a complete model line with variants rather than just a single model, and it will not have a bespoke carbon tub, but instead a mixed steel, aluminium, and carbon fibre platform drawing partly on existing 911 and 718 components.

All of that implies that it might be pitched directly at the Ferrari 296GTB, which starts at around £250,000 before options: the 911 Turbo S is around £200,000. This fits with Leiters’ plan to increase the average transaction price for Porsche’s top 10,000 models from £230,000 to £280,000. But he also believes that Porsche is ‘the strongest brand in the world’ and can push its pricing even higher.

So there’s a chance the Mission S production car could leapfrog the 296 on price, but that would depend on its powertrain, and on that Leiters absolutely won’t be drawn. He says he will say that the platform can take both hybrid and non-hybrid powertrains, and he specifically rules out an EV. I get a flat ‘no comment’ to a question about the Mission S using the flat-eight which RUF is developing. He tells me that Porsche’s ‘puristic’ customers are likely to want a manual but unlikely to want all-wheel drive, so we can probably assume that we’ll get a choice of PDK or stick but only rear-wheel drive, at least in the car’s first phase.

And if you want a view on how likely is the Mission S to make it into production and how close that car will be to what we see here. I invite you to consider the following: in 1993 Porsche showed the Boxster Concept which was near identical to the Boxster that went on sale three years later. In 2000 it showed the Carrera GT Concept and, lo and behold, four years on there was the production car in little changed form. In 2010 we stood agog at the Geneva show when Porsche unveiled the 918 Spyder concept as then boss Michael Macht observed that Porsche had never made a concept car it had not subsequently put into production. And then there was the 2015 Mission E which begat the Taycan with so few changes you had to squint to tell the difference. In short, when it comes to turning interesting looking concepts into production realities, Porsche has previous. Lots of it.

Porsche has always made great cars: it just hasn’t always made great decisions of late. So regardless of how the production version of the Mission S is powered and priced and whatever you think of the looks, it’s likely to be another great Porsche. Even so, it is the decisiveness with which Leiters is getting it done that is perhaps more significant for the future of Porsche as a whole.