A new generation of Porsche race car
The Porsche Cup has been the manufacturer’s one-make racing series since 1990, and the German automaker has just announced its new race car for the 2026 season. The 992.2-based model has been in development since January 2024, with production set to start in fall 2025 at the main Zuffenhausen plant. The 2026 Porsche Cup race car will participate in the Porsche Mobil 1 Supercup and in some Carrera Cup series races like the Porsche Carrera Cup North America.
Much like Porsche constantly improves its road-going cars, its race cars receive the same treatment. The 2026 Cup car will see better front-end aerodynamics, as well as improvements to vehicle electronics, brakes, transmission, the six-cylinder boxer engine, and vehicle handling. Four of Porsche’s top-tier race car drivers, Bastian Buus, Klaus Bachler, Laurin Heinrich, and Marco Seefried, spent a considerable amount of time testing and fine-tuning the cars on the Italian Grand Prix circuit in Monza, at the Lausitzring in Brandenburg, and on Porsche’s own track at the Weissach development center.
“We are already operating at a very high-performance level with the current GT3 Cup,” Jan Feldmann, Project Manager for GT racing cars at Porsche Motorsport, said. “This has allowed us to focus more on feedback from the global one-make cups and develop a racing car that has been refined in many areas compared to the current Cup 911.”
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The new race car was not tested on regular gasoline
Here’s where things get interesting, though. Porsche reportedly only tested the new Porsche Cup car with the eFuel blend they used in the 2025 Porsche Mobil 1 Supercup. According to the release, their blend is composed largely of renewable synthetic raw gasoline, known as MtG (methanol-to-gasoline), alongside renewable, waste-based, or residual-based ethanol, which is “used to increase the oxygen content in the fuel and the octane rating, among other things.” All of these components combined bring the octane rating to 100.5 RON. While this particular racing fuel blend was developed specifically for the boxer engines Porsche uses in motorsport, that’s not to say that the automaker won’t take the lessons it has learned on the track and bring them to road-going cars in its effort to preserve the internal combustion engine.
Porsche goes on to say that even HIF, the manufacturer of the raw fuel, is using several clever methods at its Haru Oni pilot plant in Chile to keep CO2 emissions from its production as low as possible. For example, the electricity used for grid connection and control room stabilization is sourced exclusively from renewable wind energy, while CO2 certificates from South American renewable energy plants offset the inevitable CO2 emissions from transport.
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Final thoughts
The news of a new Porsche race car is always exciting. After all, who can balk at the thought of a performance-oriented boxer engine screaming around a race track for yet another generation? Where I feel the even more exciting news lies, though, is in Porsche’s commitment to eFuel development. Porsche has claimed before that it will continue offering gas-powered cars into the 2030s, and perhaps this new eFuel is the key to being both environmentally friendly and not EV-dependent.
Stellantis also released its own statement claiming that it isn’t going all-in on EVs either, so as bleak as the situation may have looked for internal combustion engines just a few years ago, a mix of weakening consumer demand and the endless maze of automotive bureaucracy seems to be keeping our gas-powered dreams alive. Nobody has a surefire answer just yet, but the numerous plans popping up each day sure are interesting.
