2020 Porsche Panamera facelift teased, achieves new executive sedan Nürburgring lap record of 7:29.81

Porsche’s car of the moment might still be the electric Taycan, but Zuffenhausen hasn’t forgotten about its other sedan model, the Panamera. The company’s original executive express is getting a facelift on August 26 to keep the second-generation model fresh on the market.

As you can see in these teaser images, the car will receive exceedingly minor visual tweaks. This mildly-camouflaged prototype appears to be the Turbo, and it gets even more pronounced quad indicators on the front bumper, making for quite a bizarre look. The LED headlights with their four-point daytime running lights are identical to the outgoing model, but we’re expecting the final car to get revised graphics.

The biggest change is at the rear of the car. Here, the Panamera gets redesigned tail lights – now shorn of the red centre bars, the new three-dimensional units have an L-shaped strip at the bottom and a full-width strip at the top, with a clear centre section. The rear diffuser has also been mildly reprofiled, with squared-off corners surrounding the quad tailpipes.

Aside from teasing the car, Porsche has also announced that facelifted Panamera has set the Nürburgring lap record for executive cars at the Nordschleife circuit, with a time of 7 minutes 29.81 seconds. The company explained that this lap takes into account the entire track, including the roughly 200-metre stretch on the start/finish straight in front of the T13 grandstand, as per new regulations regarding timed laps.

This contrasts with the previous industry standard which shortened the 20.8 km course to 20.6 km, on which Lars Kern set a time of 7 minutes 38.46 seconds in the pre-facelifted Turbo in 2016. Four years later, the German works driver passed the 20.6 km mark in the new car in 7 minutes 25.04 seconds, meaning that the facelifted Panamera is more than 13 seconds quicker than before. It also beats the current record holder, the Mercedes-AMG GT 63 S 4Matic+, which completed the lap in 7 minutes 25.41 seconds.

Compared to the previous Turbo, the new car features an uprated 4.0 litre twin-turbocharged V8, pushing out an extra 80 PS to bring the total power output to 630 PS. Porsche’s powertrain director for the Panamera, Arno Bögl, also claimed that the new engine has 50 Nm more torque across the entire rev band, which would put the maximum torque output at a mind-boggling 820 Nm.

The car also features an enhanced active roll stabilisation system, which Kern said was “consistently effective” and gave the Panamera “incredible stability” in spite of the bumpy Nordschleife surface. The specially-developed Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 tyres, which will be available as an option, also enabled him to achieve “cornering speeds there that I would not have believed possible with the Panamera.”

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