Nico Müller isn’t the type of guy who throws around nicknames for fun. He’s a factory Formula E driver, someone who’s spent years strapped into some of the most technically demanding race cars on the planet. So when he took one look at Porsche‘s new 975 RSE and called it “the Beast,” it wasn’t marketing spin. It was a driver’s gut reaction to a machine that, on paper, sounds almost unreasonable.

We’re talking about a race car that can hit 600kW, or 816 horsepower if you prefer the more familiar unit, and rocket from 0 to 100km/h in just 1.8 seconds. Top speed clears 330km/h. For context, that’s supercar territory, except this thing is doing it on a street circuit, weaving between concrete barriers, with dozens of other cars trying to do the exact same thing inches away.

Porsche didn’t build the 975 RSE just because it felt like flexing. It’s the successor to the 99X Electric, which just wrapped up as the winningest single-seater in Porsche’s history. That car didn’t just perform well; it delivered results nobody at Porsche had managed before in this discipline. Pascal Wehrlein won the drivers’ championship in the 2023/2024 season, the first time a Porsche factory driver had done that in Formula E. Then the team backed it up by sweeping the manufacturers’ and teams’ titles the following year, and somehow topped even that by claiming both the drivers’ and manufacturers’ crowns again in 2025/2026.

So the pressure wasn’t really about proving Porsche belongs in electric racing. That’s settled. The pressure was about not dropping the ball with the follow-up. And there’s a nice bit of symbolism baked into the name too: 975 RSE quietly nods to Porsche Motorsport’s 75th anniversary this year, tying a brand-new electric race car to three-quarters of a century of racing history.

It looks like Formula 1 now, and there’s a real reason for that

If you glance at the new GEN4 generation of Formula E cars, the first thing you’ll notice is the aero. Big wings, way more aggressive bodywork, a silhouette that suddenly looks a lot closer to Formula 1 than the earlier, sleeker Formula E designs. That’s not a styling choice; it’s physics catching up with speed.

“Formula E has become so fast in just around a decade that we now need aerodynamic downforce,” explains Olivier Champenois, the Technical Project Leader for Formula E at Porsche Motorsport. But downforce isn’t free. More downforce means more drag, and drag eats into the one resource these cars can’t waste: battery energy. Porsche’s solution was to build two separate aero packages, one tuned for low drag during actual racing, and a high-downforce setup for qualifying, where a single fast lap matters more than saving energy. Champenois says the difference between the two configurations amounts to as much as 150 percent more downforce depending on setup.

The efficiency numbers are honestly wild

Here’s the part that tends to surprise people who assume Formula E is just “the electric junior league” compared to Formula 1. It’s not. In terms of raw powertrain efficiency, Formula E blows past F1, and it isn’t close. The current GEN3 Evo cars run above 97 percent powertrain efficiency, compared to under 55 percent for last-generation Formula 1 cars.

The trick is regenerative braking, and Formula E leans on it far harder than road cars or other race series. The 975 RSE can recuperate energy at up to 700kW under braking, which is a genuinely enormous number. Because of that recovery, the car can complete an entire race of more than 45 minutes using a battery that only holds 51.25kWh of usable capacity, roughly half of what the race actually consumes. The rest comes back through braking. That single fact tells you almost everything about why Formula E engineers obsess over recuperation the way F1 engineers obsess over aero mapping.

Despite the added drag from the new bigger wings, Champenois says the 975 RSE still manages 71 percent more peak power than its predecessor, which is a big generational jump by any measure.

Weight, costs, and the boring stuff that actually matters

Formula E has strict rules limiting how many parts teams can develop in-house, since a lot of the chassis, tires, aerodynamics, and battery are standardized across every manufacturer. That means the real competitive edge comes down to the bits teams are allowed to touch, and increasingly, that competition is less about squeezing out extra horsepower and more about weight, durability, and cost control, not unlike what’s happening with production EVs on public roads.

Champenois put a number on just how tight the constraints are: even with more components developed in-house for GEN4, Porsche’s overall parts package couldn’t gain more than five kilograms over the previous generation. The team’s answer was simply making individual parts lighter wherever possible.

Built from the ground up, but not from scratch

Development kicked off back in 2024, running in parallel with Porsche’s GEN3 Evo campaign, meaning engineers were literally racing one car on Saturdays while designing its replacement during the week. Champenois calls receiving the first official specs for the new generation in summer 2024 a genuine milestone, the point where theoretical planning turned into real engineering work.

Rather than starting with a blank sheet, Porsche carried over proven elements from the GEN3 Evo, including the rear-axle electric motor, transmission, differentials, driveshafts, and the rear cooling and chassis hardware. Software, though, is where things get genuinely impressive. The 975 RSE’s control units run more than 1.5 million lines of code spread across over a hundred individual modules. Champenois is blunt about why Porsche insists on writing all of it in-house rather than outsourcing: it keeps institutional knowledge inside the team and lets engineers react fast when new challenges pop up mid-season, something that’s become one of the biggest performance differentiators between manufacturers in this series.

The motor that doubles as a brake

One of the more interesting engineering choices sits at the rear axle, where an oil-cooled permanent magnet synchronous motor does double duty as both propulsion and Porsche’s most effective recuperation source, capable of recovering up to 350kW on its own. The trick is direct oil cooling, where non-conductive oil flows straight along the stator windings, right where the heat actually builds up, instead of relying on a water jacket wrapped around the outside. Porsche says an equivalent water-cooled motor would need to be roughly 1.5 times bigger to hit the same numbers.

Interestingly, this isn’t purely a motorsport trick. A nearly identical oil-cooling setup shows up in the road-going Cayenne Turbo Electric, which is a good example of how Porsche’s racing and production teams increasingly borrow from each other rather than operating in separate silos.

From simulator to actual asphalt

Long before any physical car existed, engineers tested components digitally using what’s called “in-the-loop testing,” essentially plugging real hardware like steering wheels and sensors into a simulated vehicle environment so testing could start even when the car itself only existed in pieces. Champenois says GEN4 pushed this further than GEN3 ever needed to, partly because of new flexibility in how the axle differentials can be tuned and calibrated.

But simulation only gets you so far. Even the best digital tools fall short of real-world conditions by two to three percent, which sounds small until you remember that margin can decide a race. That’s why Nico Müller and Pascal Wehrlein have been out testing the physical 975 RSE on track since November 2025, fine-tuning everything simulation couldn’t fully predict.

What’s next

Champenois is expecting lap times in the ballpark of Formula 2, which would be a serious jump in raw pace for the series. Fans should get their first real look at the 975 RSE in competitive action starting December 2026, when the GEN4 era officially begins and Müller and Wehrlein finally get to unleash the car they’ve spent nearly two years building toward.