Seven thousand five hundred miles. That's about how far you would've needed to travel to drive the Corkscrew at Laguna Seca, scythe through the Bus Stop chicane at Daytona, and slingshot around the Karussell at the Nürburgring-Nordschleife—until now. On April 1, a new track at the Porsche Experience Center in Atlanta that includes re-creations of all three iconic corners will open to the public, part of a multimillion-dollar expansion at Porsche's North American headquarters.

Since its launch in 2015, the Experience Center has hosted almost 400,000 visitors, according to Porsche. The facility had featured a handling circuit, a restaurant, a gift shop, and a small museum space displaying classic Porsches, but it now adds a new course designed by Hermann Tilke, who has been the brain behind several Formula 1 track layouts such as the Bahrain International Circuit. The 1.3-mile West Track will be used for 90-minute one-on-one lessons in Porsche's sports cars and can be combined with the original circuit or run on its own, which is how we experienced it during a media event ahead of the official opening.

We drove the course in a variety of Porsches—including a 911 GT3 and a Taycan—and also experienced it from the passenger's seat of the 1073-hp 718 Cayman GT4 ePerformance prototype, which we first rode along in at Porsche's Experience Center in Franciacorta, Italy, last year. While the new Atlanta circuit doesn't have a straight section quite as long as in Italy—where we saw the ePerformance top out around 150 mph—it feels more dynamic due to its hilly topography.

Exiting the pits, you climb through a series of quick esses before dropping back down for a sharp 90-degree right hander. You then ascend 30 feet to the Laguna Seca–like Corkscrew, which features a stomach-churning 25-foot drop through the chicane. A twisty section on the back half of the track emulates the famous Tail of the Dragon road in the Great Smoky Mountains, before you get to the bumpy and banked Carousel (Porsche opts to use the English spelling), which tries its hardest to unsettle the chassis.

Within the confines of the West Track are three other setups that will support other driving lessons. A skidpad, which Porsche calls a low-friction circle, with wet, polished concrete covers 196 feet in diameter and allows drivers to explore the limits of grip and learn how to manage understeer and oversteer. We spent our time on the skidpad holding a prolonged drift in a 718 Cayman GT4 with a goofy grin plastered across our face.
There is also the Ice Hill, which mimics an icy climb that one might encounter in the wintry months in the northern United States. Tackling its 8 percent slope and watered, polished surface teaches drivers how to smoothly apply throttle, brakes, and steering input in dicey conditions. We sampled it in a variety of cars: a rear-wheel-drive Cayman required a delicate right foot to make it up the hill, while an all-wheel-drive Macan allowed us to execute drifts while easily remaining in control.

Lastly, an autocross course with cones in an expansive paved area allows for a variety of lessons, from practicing launches and heavy braking to precise steering in tight corners. We tested the launch control in a glorious-sounding 911 GT3 and in the hushed but face-melting Taycan Turbo S.

When combined with all available track surfaces—including the original circuit—the new handling course forms part of a 2.9-mile road. The track will be open to both Porsche owners and others, and the Experience Center sits just a few miles away from the busy Atlanta International Airport.

Porsche-backed HIF Global has received approval to begin construction of the world's largest e-fuels production facility in Texas. This campus will be the company's second after its pilot site in Chile and will eventually produce enough hydrogen-based fuel for 400,000 cars. It will be the first commercial-scale e-fuels plant in the world, a vital step toward proving that the technology has legs.

The company's small site in South America produces a minuscule amount of e-fuel exclusively for Porsche, using renewable energy and carbon dioxide captured directly from the atmosphere. It's unclear where HIF Global's new facility in Matagorda, about two hours south of Houston, will get its energy, or its carbon, for that matter. The company has stated its hydrogen will be sourced through electrolysis—Matagorda is on the Gulf Coast—though the use of renewable energy is essential for e-fuels to make sense from an environmental perspective.

The sort of e-fuels HIF Global produces are drop-in compatible with regular gasoline-powered cars. This means no new vehicle has to be built to use it, which is a boon to its sustainability. Electric vehicles, efficient as they may be, produce far more carbon when they are manufactured as compared to gasoline-powered cars because of the dirty battery production process. That being said, e-fuels are not an efficient way to use energy. As Hydrogen Insight notes, it takes 100 kilowatt hours of energy to create just 13 kilowatt-hours worth of e-fuel which will be burned at low efficiency. For reference, a single gallon of gasoline contains around 33.5 kWh of energy. EVs, on the other hand, use about 77 kWh of that theoretical 100 kWh of energy. If an excess of renewable energy is available, though, the actual carbon impact of using e-fuels is negligible.

HIF expects its fuel will eventually cost "less than €1 per liter," but it's prohibitively expensive at present. The fuel from the company's Chile facility costs $55 per liter just to produce. In the near future, though, HIF says "as the production of e-fuels on an industrial scale with direct air capture becomes established, production of around €2 per liter can arise." That would translate into a fuel price of around $9 per gallon, or in the neighborhood of European fuel prices. Compared to the high upfront cost of electrifying, that's a price some in the United States may be willing to pay.

This announcement is huge for the rising tide of e-fuels. Porsche is a key investor in HIF, and other automakers are interested in the technology as well. Stellantis, for instance, has been testing many of its engines to run on the fuel, as its CEO Carlos Tavares isn't sold on electrification, to say the least. The biggest boon to the technology, however, was when it got carved out of the EU's internal combustion ban. Short of a stream of subsidies, that's the best news proponents of the tech could've asked for.

CarBuzz has discovered yet another fascinating engineering development from Porsche, and this time, it relates to the valvetrain. The patent was unearthed at the German Patent and Trade Mark Office and details how Porsche intends to blend the best of both traditional valve springs and pneumatic valves, simultaneously canceling out the issues inherent to each.

The long and short of it is that this technology would aid high-revving engines and could be used to push the Porsche 911 GT3 RS past its current 9,000 rpm rev ceiling, perhaps cresting 10,000 rpm or even higher.

In order to understand how this new design works, we first need to take a look at each of these systems in isolation.

We all know how traditional valve springs work, compressing as the valve opens and decompressing to force the valve closed. This is a reliable system, but valve springs are not easily controlled at very high speeds, leading to a phenomenon known as valve float.

Pneumatic valves allow for far greater high-speed control, replacing springs with lightweight compressed air bellows. The benefit of this is that the ECU can retract valves that rely on pressure far more quickly than it can valves that rely on compressed metal; compressed springs will take longer to decompress than it would take for one to simply reduce the amount of air pressure being pumped into the valvetrain. At high rpm, if the valve can't retract quick enough, you get valve float (a separation between the cam lobe and the valve) and the valve has a higher likelihood of kissing the piston.

But if pneumatic valves are so great and are regularly used in motorsport, why are they not part of regular roadgoing car engines?

The short answer is that they're simply not feasible and only offer real benefits at high rpm. They cost more and are more complex, but they also traditionally suffer from leaks. The other issue is that compressed air needs to be refilled, and without a heavy onboard compressor, one would need to top up the system fairly regularly (usually after each race).

Renault has tried the concept, and Koenigsegg has taken it further with Freevalve, a camshaft-free system using pneumatic actuators, but that, too, is extraordinarily complex.

Porsche diehards will know that Porsche has toyed with pneumatic valves before this. The V10 engine in the iconic Porsche Carrera GT did use traditional springs, but the prototype from which it was derived was an F1 engine developed to rev up to 20,000 rpm. This was the engine that used pneumatic springs, something that was common in Formula 1 engines of the era. However, in roadgoing form, the engine didn't need to rev that high, so the tech was not included.

Porsche's idea is not simple either, but it looks like a great way of improving efficiency. It aims to use pneumatic valves but to increase the pressure to these pneumatic valves using a spring and more compressed air. A channel leading to the pneumatic valve chamber would feed compressed air to a spring, with this spring used to maintain maximum pneumatic valve pressure externally.

Essentially, this would help to increase the pressure that the pneumatic valve can exert, which aims to improve response and efficiency by creating a perfect seal at all times. This perfect seal would help to increase the cam rotation angle using more than just the explosive force of the combustion cycle. As a result, the entire system would be tighter and thus more efficiently burn fuel and air.

Porsche mentions "high-revving series or racing engine" applications, which implies that Zuffenhausen sees potential for use in both motorsport and limited-series high-performance supercars like the 911 GT3 RS. We'll just have to wait and see if Porsche follows through.