Porsche has opened its ninth Porsche Experience Center (PEC) in Japan, and it sounds like the automotive version of one of those buffet restaurants where each table has different culinary theme.
The headline feature of the 43-hectare site is a 1.3-km handling track that contains replicas of some of the world’s most famous race track corners set within typically Japanese countryside.
While many of the eight existing PEC tracks are on flat ground, the Tokyo center is built into naturally hilly, wood-covered land, not unlike the area surrounding Germany’s legendary Nürburgring circuit. Recreating the entire 12.9 miles of the ’Ring would have been a tall order, but the designers have been able to replicate the iconic banked Carousel corner.
California’s Laguna Seca is another track famous for way it rises and falls over the course of a lap, and the Japanese PEC team has replicated Laguna’s best known section, the Corkscrew.
Related: Move Over Porsche, Toyota Has Dropped A Nürburgring Edition Corolla Sedan
Other features of the Tokyo PEC that will be familiar to visitors to some of the other sites include a low friction handling track where customers can safely hone their car control, an off-load course with banks measuring up to 40 degrees, and a “Dynamic Area” for slaloms and trying out the cars’ launch control functions.
There’s also a low friction “drift circle”, and one of those amusing kick-plates that send your car into oversteer as you drive over them, forcing you to pull off your best heroic save. Or possibly just repeatedly spin in frustration half a dozen times, while your instructor gives silent thanks that he doesn’t have to share a car with you in the real world.
Naturally, PEC Tokyo features a showroom and salesman who’ll be more than happy to part you from your Yen. The design of the main building was apparently inspired by traditional Japanese craft, and the interior also carries on the local theme. Its opening brings the total number of PECs to nine, Porsche having already launched similar centers in Leipzig, Silverstone, Atlanta, Le Mans, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Hockenheim, and Franciacorta, Italy.