Porsche? Hybrid? Really? I’ll give Stuttgart a pass on the Cayenne – I realize that the SUV market was prime for profits and in the end, it *is* one of the nicer SUVs on the road.  Panamericana, well, I’m finally starting to see them on the road quite a bit, so the jury’s out on that one. But Porsche catching the hybrid bug – and it’s first deployment is in the most covenanted vehicle Porsche produces – is this sacrilege?

Not quite. The new Porsche GT3 R Hybrid isn’t about fuel economy and goin’ green – it’s about performance – performance in the form of KERS. In case you missed class a few weeks ago, KERS stands for Kinetic Energy Recovery System, and is the newest technology employed by F1 in the 2009 Season. In the case of the Porsche GT3 R Hybrid, KERS will be deployed using an electro-magnetic flywheel which was actually developed by the Williams F1 team. During braking the gearbox mounted KERS system spins the flywheel up to 40,000RPM, when extra power is needed the flywheel drives _its_ motor/generator to provide power back to the gearbox.

The KERS unit itself is a engineering marvel.  The flywheels itself is a composite material that is actually molded _with_ magnetic particles, so it can act as a magnet for the motor.  As a result, the system has less weight then a battery and is more actually similar to an ultracapacitor (there’s a Wiki link for ya… I needed it too).

No word so far as to what actual power output will be, or what other bells & whistles Porsche is releasing in the GT3 R Hybrid, but they *did* setup a cool microsite dedicated to the car with plenty of videos, wallpapers and info.