If you’ve spent any seat time on a track, you’ll remember the pure adrenaline rush of running a car on a straightaway at high speed and twisting around the corners with significant G-force. Porsche shared a video yesterday with pro racer Leh Keen sprinting around Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta in a blistering hot lap and it has me looking at my calendar to see how soon I can get there myself.
About an hour northeast of my beloved Georgia metropolis, Road Atlanta is a 2.54-mile 12-turn road course in the middle of a lush pine forest. The motorsports facility hosts the Motul Petit Le Mans, Drift Atlanta, The Mitty, and there is also an off-road course where you could careen around in vehicles like the Porsche 911 off-road Safari cars Keen famously builds.
The Porsche Keen drives in this video is a standard production 718 Cayman GT4 equipped with full bucket seats and Porsche ceramic carbon brakes, both available as options if you were to buy a car like this one. It sits on Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 N1 tires, which is a standard, road-legal tire for the 718.
Keen grew up in Dublin, Georgia, and has set a number of lap records for Porsche at Road Atlanta. You might remember that he also owns the Guinness World Record for fastest vehicle speed indoors with a Taycan Turbo S as of February. From a standstill, he hit 102.6 miles per hour on the slippery floors of the Ernest N. Morial Convention Centre in New Orleans in 2.6 seconds and left the previous record of 86 miles per hour set in 2013 by a lightweight custom Cross Kart.
A 2021 Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 starts at $100,000 and runs with 414 horsepower with a 4.0-liter six-cylinder powerplant. Top track speed is 189 miles per hour and Keen kissed 153 while expertly piloting the Porsche on the pavement, lightly touching the brakes as needed. The fastest I’ve ever experienced on a track was 175 miles per hour and as I watched the G-force meter I could just about feel it myself.
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