This full video shows just how bonkers the VW Pikes Peak record was

Enlarge (credit: Volkswagen)

At the end of June, Volkswagen and French racing driver Romain Dumas did something many of us thought impossible. Using a highly specialized electric vehicle called the "I.D. R Pikes Peak," Dumas raced to the top of Pikes Peak in Colorado in under eight minutes, shattering the existing records for EVs by a full minute and the overall record (set by Peugeot and Sebastian Loeb in 2013) by a hefty 16 seconds.

Ars was there to see it happen, but truth be told you don't actually see that much of anyone's run at Pikes Peak if you're there in person. The course is 12.4 miles (19.99km) long, so even if you have a media vest and are free to roam outside the official spectating zones, you still really have to pick a corner and then be content with watching a small slice of each attempt from there.

But one of the marvels of living in the early 21st century is our access to small and rugged digital cameras. In fact, the organizers of the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb are pretty good about putting a GoPro on every car and bike that runs up the mountain in anger, and within a week almost all of these were posted to YouTube. But not Dumas' run, no matter how often I begged on Twitter.

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