Porsche Cayenne S Diesel breaks production car towing record

14 May, 2017

For your general SUV market, towing capacity is a nice bonus, but for some it can make or break a vehicle purchase. Recognising such a necessity, and let’s be honest, selling point, Porsche has taken the new Cayenne S Diesel and hitched it up to the heaviest aircraft they could get their hands one … a 314 ton Airbus A380. 

The mammoth piece of machinery was lent to Porsche from Air France, resulting in a towed distance of 42 metres across Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, and Porsche are claiming that this torquey wonder is just a everyday feat for Cayenne’s 4.2-litre diesel V8

It marks a new Guinness World Record for the heaviest aircraft towed by a production vehicle, with the A380 weighing in at a staggering 126.7 tons more than the previous record tow.

To put it into understandable, that equates to roughly 232 Porsche 944 race cars … don’t take our word for it though, Porsche have made sure to seal the deal in video evidence.

The actual Formula One

Seeing, in a shed in Hamilton, New Zealand, the Darracq 120 racer that Louis Wagner, also a pioneer aviator, drove to victory in the 1906 Vanderbilt Cup race felt a little like finding a Rembrandt at a garage sale.
For historical significance, I’d say this car ranks with Ray Harroun’s Marmon Wasp, the first Indianapolis 500 winner. Unlike Harroun’s Wasp, which has been lovingly cared for at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Hall of Fame Museum over the years, this historically pivotal machine wound up half a world away from its home in France and, to most of the motoring world, largely forgotten. Sadly, so is the story of how the car got to Aotearoa in the first place.
More often than not, a racing car that is a few years old is regarded as obsolete and relegated to a shed somewhere. As far as racing drivers and team owners at the cutting edge of the sport are concerned, the cars are virtually worthless at that point. They can’t be driven on the street; at best they can be reconfigured for lower levels of the sport, so few people care about them until their historical significance becomes more apparent.

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