What do you do with a convention center when there aren't any conventions?
Racer Leh Keen used the vast, open space inside the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans and a Porsche Taycan Turbo S to set a Guinness World Record for fastest speed achieved by a vehicle indoors.
The 750-hp electric sports car reached 102.6 mph on its stock street tires, easily beating the 7-year-old record of 86 mph, on Keen's first attempt.
To qualify, Keen had to start from a standstill, with no doors to the building open and no safety net. He did it in New Orleans because it has the largest contiguous convention hall in the U.S. But the 1 million square feet of space also has a slick, polished concrete floor, which complicated the effort.
"I didn't really appreciate the scale of the record attempt until my first exploratory run," Keen said in a statement from Porsche. "The surface is so unpredictable, so slick, that you have to have complete trust in your car. It truly was like ice — and you're accelerating flat out, facing a really hard wall at the end. Suddenly, even in a massive space like the one we had, it seems very small. I could feel the Taycan's systems figuring it out, working so hard to keep me heading straight."
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