The car bit of the internet was ablaze yesterday with news that Porsche was getting ready to unleash a brand new hypercar. But speaking exclusively to Carscoops, Porsche says the idea is pure fan-fiction.

Comedy writer and confirmed Porsche fan Spike Feresten sparked the rumors by claiming on his podcast that a successor to the 918 Spyder called the GT1 was in the works.

“I heard a rumor from a source about a new Porsche that right now, if you’d like to, you can put a deposit down on a Porsche GT1,” he said. “The rumor is, they’re going to announce this in August. There is going to be a new Porsche GT1 mid-engined special car that will follow in the footsteps of the Carrera GT and the 918.”

This wasn’t the first time we’d heard about Porsche working on such a car. At the Geneva Motor Show back in March 2019, Porsche chairman Oliver Blume told Drive that the company was investigating a new hypercar. And since Porsche is gearing up for the new LDMh hypercar class at Le Mans, it’s not inconceivable that it could build a road-going version.

Related: Porsche’s Next Hypercar Won’t Come Before 2025 Because Battery Tech Isn’t Ready

Porsche has, of course previously used the GT1 badge. The 911 GT1 (which looked vaguely like a 911, but was totally different under the skin) won the Le Mans 24 Hours in 1998, and Porsche built 25 Strassenversion road cars to homologate it.

But Porsche has firmly denied to Carscoops that a ‘GT1’ road car is imminent. “I can confirm that there are no plans for any car of this kind,” a spokesman told us. Asked whether this denial applied specifically to a Le Mans hypercar-derived spiritual successor to the 1990s GT1, or hypercars in general, Porsche replied that it “extends to any car of that kind.”

At this point it’s worth looking at Blume’s further comments to Drive in 2019 regarding a next-generation hypercar. “I see a possibility for a hypercar with the next generation of the batteries,” he said at the time.

Porsche’s 919 Street concept imagined the 919 Le Mans winer as a road car

More recently, he told Autocar that the battery “will be the ‘cylinder’ of tomorrow, so we still have to investigate high-power, high-density cells. We will invest in these cells, and when we have the right cell for a high-power car, then will come to the point, but I don’t think about this car before the second half of the decade.”

The “next generation of batteries” almost certainly refers to solid-state battery tech, which will make future power packs lighter, smaller, more powerful and faster charging than conventional lithium-ion equivalents. That could be exactly what Porsche needs to ensure any new hypercar appears to move the game on, and not give people the impression it has simply created a faster, sportier-looking Taycan.

But most big carmakers say solid-state tech won’t be viable for production cars until at least 2025. On top of that, the dust is only just settling on the announcement about Bugatti, Porsche and Croatian EV-specialist Rimac’s joint venture. Thus, we suspect Porsche isn’t trying to throw us off the scent when it says a new hypercar isn’t imminent.

The Porsche 919 Street Concept