Formula One racing cars used to come fitted, as standard, with a device called — nice shades of Nasa and the Apollo space project here — “launch control”. The idea was to take the sweat and the tricky clutch-work out of getting the car off the grid at the start of a race, where the price of stalling includes humiliation and anything up to £450 trillion-worth of sponsorship money (approximately).

Essentially, the driver kept his foot on the brake, engaged “launch control”, floored the accelerator and waited. Then, when the lights went out, he lifted his foot off the brake and — k’thwap — the car pinged off the starting line like a stone out of a catapult. The FIA, the regulatory body that runs Formula One, banned launch control in 2004 as part of a package of measures aimed at rehumanising the sport by returning control of the car to the driver. And, well, it had a point.

But good news, everyone. The ban doesn’t extend to road cars, and fans of a screaming yet idiot-proof tear-off will be pleased to discover that launch control is proudly available on the all-new Porsche Panamera — at least if you shell out for the range-topping Turbo version, where seamless, stall-free race-starts, plus four seats and a surprising amount of boot space, can be yours for a mere £95,298.

I got my first taste of launch control, Panamera-style, in the passenger seat beside a qualified instructor, with, sensibly, nothing ahead of us apart from a couple of miles of empty racetrack. And blimey — shades of Michael J. Fox in that rigged DeLorean. As the driver held the car on the brake, the engine strained impatiently and emitted a keening top-note, which I was briefly able to identify as the F-sharp above middle C. Then the brake came off, at which point my ears, along with my neck, went into reverse and clobbered the headrest, a blinding white light enshrouded the car and we went back to 1953, where I almost accidentally prevented my father from marrying my mother.

Great fun, of course — if you count the instant induction of head-to-toe nausea among your pleasures, which I’m not sure I do. And a praiseworthy piece of computer-enhanced engineering, too. At the same time, I tried to list the occasions in a person’s ordinary driving life when he or she might notionally have the opportunity to take advantage of a launch-control facility, in all its glory. Terrific value at traffic lights, obviously. And I suppose it would be a bit of a laugh, every now and then, off the drive on the way to school of a morning. Otherwise, and this is just my hunch, we’re probably looking at a fairly limited day-to-day application here.

Overall, though, the big idea underpinning the Panamera was the creation of a high-end sports car with the greater reasonableness of a family saloon (also high-end). If that set mild alarm bells ringing, it was because the last time Porsche strayed from building the two-seaters for which it is correctly legendary, the result was the Cayenne, a coruscatingly ugly SUV that only narrowly lost out to the Ssangyong Rodius in the battle to be the ugliest car on Britain’s roads.

So what a relief to find something with the Panamera’s handsome, low-slung lines. In two-wheel drive, as in appearance, the car does a loose but enjoyable impression of a 911 — especially because, from the driving seat, its bulk miraculously shrinks to the point where you could almost be driving around inside a carpet slipper. At the same time, the four-wheel drive offers a stately, unflustered ride that would possibly convince an elderly relative, collected from a railway station, that you had made a sensible car-choice, rather than recklessly tossed a gobsmacking amount of money at a tarmac-rogering (and relatively short-lived, if VW, Porsche’s owners, has much to do with it) luxury-wagon.

At the testing centre I was able to see how capably the car handled and how tenaciously it kept its grip under all sorts of hostile circumstances, including but not limited to my own bad driving. Even on surfaces treated to react like greased plastic, the Panamera would do its computer-generated darnedest to save my bacon and its own superb paintwork.

Some people are sniffy about this kind of electronic nannying, for the same reason that the FIA was sniffy about launch control, but, speaking personally, when a car this powerful and this big hits a sheet of black ice and begins to pirouette like Darcey Bussell, I’ll take all the German-bred robotic assistance I can get if it means I eventually end up pointing the right way again.

Price From £72,266

Top speed 188mph

Acceleration 0-62 in 5.4 seconds

Consumption 25.4mpg

Emissions 260g/km