Porsche GT2 RS v. Ducati 1199 Panigale: The Drag Race. - /CHRIS HARRIS ON CARS

[ENGINE ROARING] [TIRES SQUEALING] CHRIS HARRIS: So far in 2012, we've driven, drifted, and experienced just about every sports car and super car imaginable. It's been a good year, hasn't it? But I haven't done one thing. I haven't done a drag race, and drag races are internet gold. So I need the numbers. So here I am sitting in a 997 GT2 RS, and I'm going to have a drag race. But I want it to be a bit more interesting, so I'm going to use a motorcycle. I have a man called Ben with me, and he's brought along a Ducati 1199 Panigale, and it fascinates me, because I can't ride it. And we are going to have a race. The Panigale is-- or so I'm told by those who know about these things-- something of a revolution for Ducati. It marks a complete change from the previous 1198 model. The single-sided rear swing arm may look familiar, but the bike is effectively frameless, having the rear suspension mounted to the back of the 192-horsepower V-twin. Yes. I did say that correctly-- 192 horsepower in a bicycle. This is the blinged-up Tricolore model with ABS and electronically adjustable Ohlins dampers. You see, to a car driver like me, it looks absolutely stunning. It'll be ridden by Ben Cope from Visordown.com, and frankly, he's welcome to it. Strangely, as of a few weeks time, Ducati and Porsche will both be owned by Volkswagen. How about that? Anyhow, onto the GT2 RS, the baddest Porsche of this-- well, for that matter-- any generation. 620 horsepower-- that's 611 brake horsepower for us Brits-- around 1,370 kilograms, 325 section rear Michelins, and in the interests of a fair contest, a good old-fashioned manual gearbox. Just my luck, then, that Ducati arrived wearing a bloody quick-shifter. Anyway, on with the battle. Oh, and to Wes and the Ryder Park team back in the US, sorry I had to do this without you chaps. OK, so what are we trying to achieve here? We're doing a practice run. I'm going to do a quick burnout, and then we're going to see if we can get the 611-horsepower GT2 RS off the line. I just tried try to practice with cold tires, and it wasn't very nice, let's say. So the skill of getting the GT2 RS off the line when you've got to beat a Ducati Panigale. It's not very easy. I've got all the stuff off. Dampers are soft. I'm trying to judge it. So we come up and we stage, and then we get going when he gets the green light going. [BANGING GEARS] CHRIS HARRIS: It's an animal. I just can't get it off the line. I just can't get it off the line. Whew. How the hell am I going to beat that bike? I've just watched him do a 10.2 seconds down, and of course, this isn't going to get close. BEN COPE: I've got exactly the same nerves as when I pull up to a set of lights next to a fast car and think I'm going to race them even if they don't want to race me. [REVVING ENGINE] BEN COPE: Pulling up to the timing lights. Off the line, it's really hard to get it off the line. So much to learn there. I think I've just got to do a really gentle roll off the line like I would at a race rather than giving it a handful of revs. Get it rolling at 5, 10 miles an hour and then pin the throttle, really. I think in that case, the Porsche might have won, and I might have been making a claim on the insurance. CHRIS HARRIS: So one more practice for me. I'll got to work on everything. First to second is too slow. I'm losing traction everywhere. [TIRES SQUEALING] CHRIS HARRIS: Deary me. Deary me. So that was a bit smoother off the line. I'm trying not to let the thing spool up, but still it won't take full power in second gear on that surface. Wow. [REVVING MOTOR] BEN COPE: That felt a lot better. A lot of wheel spin, even in a straight line. It's hard to know what the traction control is doing, really. I'll probably take it off for the next round, and then I know when it's spinning, it's spinning, and I'm the one who's got to control it. I guess it proves that you need to get heat in that rear tire so it grips or else. If you've got traction control on, I'm sure you can run with traction control on. It's on the lowest setting-- just to stop me having a massive straight line high side. But if you've got traction control on and the tire's cold, it just cuts in way too early. I wonder what that Porsche is doing. CHRIS HARRIS: Now there's two ways of looking at this. I'm either about to get completely thumped by a motorcyclist or-- and this is the way I prefer-- I'm about to get the best view in the house of someone doing something really spectacular on a very spectacular machine. So I'm kind of looking forward to it. BEN COPE: I feel like I'm doing this for motorcycling, and this goes down in record. And if I don't get it right, then I'm going to have a lot of annoyed bikers on forums slating me for being hopeless. It's the kind of car you want to come up against at the lights, but at the same time, you don't, really. Rolling up to the lights. Weight up in the front, the front and the rear brake, a tiny amount of revs. Here we-- CHRIS HARRIS: Look at him go! And I'm bloody sideways. Oh, he's just disappeared. He's just disappeared. [LAUGHING] On a stop as well. That's really a legend. What a legend. Now I'll get my excuses out of the way. I couldn't get it off the line properly. I just haven't been able to. And it's just tricky. I have to say, it's just tricky. But one thing I will say is that we tried to bring it yesterday before we got thrown off to go a bit quicker. And over 150, it's a slightly different story. This car really starts to claw it back. BEN COPE: That felt pretty good, but it's so hard to tell whether that was quicker than the run before. Getting off the line felt slow. I could just see the Porsche in the corner of my eye, and that just gave me a massive dump of adrenaline. I just thought, right, get that throttle open now, fast, and hold it open. So that's what racing does to you. CHRIS HARRIS: So off the line, the reaction time doesn't count because the timing doesn't start until you go, yeah? BEN COPE: Yeah. CHRIS HARRIS: So 60 feet, you were a tenth and a half up on me-- 1.9 versus 2.05. And then you start to do the damage. So at 330 feet, you go through in 4.89, round up to 4.9. I'm 5.33. So you've gone from one and a half tenths to effectively three and a half tenths. Actually, more like 4/10. And then at one eighth of a mile-- I couldn't tell you what that is in feet-- you got me by about 7/10. So it's gone up-- BEN COPE: It's back on 71/0, yeah. CHRIS HARRIS: And then the elapsed time at that point-- so the terminal speed is 110 for you and 100 for the car. At this stage, by the way, I'm just watching you because it was pretty [BLEEP] awesome to watch. BEN COPE: Yeah, yeah. CHRIS HARRIS: And the thing seems to be on the back wheel the whole time. Although I was, at times, getting a bit busy with some weird over-steery stuff in a straight line, which is odd. And then at 1,000-- I think this was 1,000 feet, is it? BEN COPE: Yeah. CHRIS HARRIS: 1,000 feet, you've-- call it second. I think a second at that speed is a long-- it looks a lot more visually. When I'm in the car, you've gone, basically. And then you're doing 127 at that point, and I'm doing 115. The quarter mile, you did it in 10.69. I did it in 11.75. Your speed was 139.5. I was 129. But interestingly, at the quarter mile, the gap is stabilizing, isn't it? So you're not pulling away. BEN COPE: Yeah. CHRIS HARRIS: Let's leave the world in the conditional tense. Because yesterday we went to Bruntingthorpe, didn't we? BEN COPE: Yeah. CHRIS HARRIS: Bruntingthorpe is a disused airfield-- old American airbase in Leicestershire where you can go really fast. We got thrown off because the Ducati was too noisy. They have a drive-by of whatever, and we did one run in Fairplay, and we got thrown off straight away. I still don't know how they do VMAX up there with Ferrari 599 GTOs and stuff because they must have a different noise system for that. What was interesting was initially we did one run before. One or two just sort of speculative, weren't they, runs? BEN COPE: Played around, yeah. CHRIS HARRIS: You had never ridden the bike before. So this lunatic gets on the thing. He's never ridden it before, and the first two things he does, he just basically has the front wheel off the ground and disappear. And it was quite clear that up about 130, the bike has got the legs on the car. And I reckon over 140, the car starts to turn the tables. Now we know that the Panigale probably won't be much more than about 175, 180 on the straight there. BEN COPE: Yeah, flat. CHRIS HARRIS: But the car pulled an indicated 195 without being absolutely flat and kept going. So I think we've done two things here. We've answered a question. But we've probably asked another one, haven't we, that I think we owe it to ourselves to go and answer at some point in the future. BEN COPE: Don't do it half. CHRIS HARRIS: Anything about today that surprised you in terms of your technique, what you had to do to get the bike off the line? BEN COPE: If you're aggressive, unless you're really, really good, it's just not going to work. And I think we were both trying to be a bit more aggressive thing-- a bit at low speed, and that was it. That's your run over. So I think it's really important to get that Panigale off the line smooth. Fast, but not trying to put everything through the back wheel, because it will either spin up, go a bit sideways, or hook up, or anything like that. And as soon as that bike's gone unstable, you can't really get it back from there. Whereas, obviously, I think it's probably a bit easier in the car. If it starts to go sideways, you can temper it. But on the bike, that's aborted. So I think to do a good run, it was really important to not get carried away and to just let it off the line, and then when you've dealt with first gear, absolutely go for it. I felt like I was chasing the bike through. CHRIS HARRIS: Oh, you were wide open in second, were you? BEN COPE: Yeah. CHRIS HARRIS: This is what I find staggering, is that you're wide open in second, and your effective contact patch with the road is probably that. I don't know, what? Four inches? BEN COPE: Yeah, like a card sort of thing, yeah. CHRIS HARRIS: And I couldn't-- well, I did. I stayed wide open in second gear a couple of times. And you saw the black lines that were being laid down. And I was going up the road like this with that much lock on. And I've got two contact patches that are about that wide on the ground. I didn't expect that at all. I thought I'd have a load more traction in second gear. What does this tell us? BEN COPE: Unless you're prepared to bend your bike trying, if you want to go up against a really fast car, you've got to get it right to get off the line. Because I think that if you fluff the start like I did on the first run, then the bike at 10 miles an hour has got the front wheel three feet in the air, and you need to sort it out. So I always thought that, meeting a car at traffic lights, I'd always be able to destroy them. And I always thought that I was going as quick as you can go. But you learn at some point that there's so much more in that last bit of really going quick. CHRIS HARRIS: If you come across someone that can peddle a Panigale on the road in a straight line, don't go anywhere near it because it will just-- particularly that sort of-- you described it, so 40 to 90. It's quite a strange sensation to be in a car that's as powerful as a GT2 RS and will do things that you know a GT2 RS will do, and to be wide open, and watch this thing ahead of you just disappearing as if you're standing still. And you've got 611 horsepower, going flat out. And it's just going away. That's quite humbling, actually. BEN COPE: It's hard-- CHRIS HARRIS: So I think we have to agree that this is part one. BEN COPE: Yeah, of a long series of parts, yeah. CHRIS HARRIS: Do you reckon we can do seven parts of Panigale versus other various road cars? BEN COPE: Yeah. CHRIS HARRIS: Well, the GT2 RS is going to be around. So I think we should definitely go and do part two of this. This ends at 140 miles an hour though, I see it. So we need 139.5 and beyond. We need to do that. And I'll put five on the Porsche, but I've got to give you a fiver for this. And then I think probably maybe a particular lap time or look at the difference in performance between the two in terms of cornering, performance braking, and other things like that. And then we move from there. BEN COPE: Yeah, definitely. I think this stage is the coming down the slip road. And the next stage is the flat out on the motorway sort of thing. CHRIS HARRIS: Not that Ben is in any way condoning this kind of behavior on the public road. It's not on as even. It's 1-0 to you. BEN COPE: Thank you. CHRIS HARRIS: And that was the end of my time watching the back end of the beautiful Panigale. Well, almost.