The origins of Hoonipigasus
started long before any of these conversations. The goal was simple, build the ultimate Pikes Peak 911. The Hoonicorn of Porsches. Yeah, I mean... It's been his life goal
to race Pikes. I've always loved that race
and that mountain. To say it's a dream,
I think it's an understatement. If 25-year-old Betim could see this,
he'd say, "You're full of s**t." That's where it all starts. Right. They're squaring it all up. Jordan's just laying out
the fixtures of the back half of Hoonipig right here. And, that's how he gets it
all dialed in. It starts there. He's got all the fixtures
down here on this table. Holding the spine. This is the front floor, lower control arm. And, this is what the splitter
will mount up to right here. And then, that's the main hoop
finished and squared, plumbed in. And, I don't know if you can see
all of these tubes will come back and intersect back here. The engine will sit here. The gearbox here. Rear suspension here. So, it's coming along. So, first, all the characters
and everyone in play here. So, obviously, Mr. Ken Block,
he's a rally car driver. You know him best
from Gymkhana films, and it's been his oddly life goal
to race Pikes, and he hasn't done it in the past
16 or 17 years of his career. Derek Dauncey is our head
of all things racing for Ken Block in Hoonigan Racing Division. He has such a list of amazing laurels
that he's too humble to admit. I mean, this guy
is one of the reasons that Mitsubishi took
a world championship in Rally. So, I've been working with Ken
for 17 years. I oversee the racing side
of Hoonigan Race team. It's been a challenging 17 years
an interesting 17 years, but luckily,
we've had some great car builds. And, Pikes Peak Project is one of the best ones
we've been involved in. Betim Berisha's story in Porsches
starts in his early 20s. He'll tell you himself, he doesn't really know
how it all worked. It's just one day,
he was working on Porsches, and then he was working
for Porsche and eventually spun off
to do his own thing. BBI came about as an idea. I always wanted
to work on Porsches independently of working for another shop. In my mid to late 20s, I found myself not doing Porsche
well enough and found myself not doing BBI
well enough. Ended up leaving Porsche full time
and running with BBI. I was wildly naive
that I could go do it, but anyway, stuck with it. And, it's been a long journey to be sitting
in front of you guys, here. This project started
at Pikes Peak 2021. After we took first place
in the Cayman Yokohama Challenge, first place in open class
with Lucy 0.2, and third place in TA1
with Donahue. The race was over,
I was interviewing Betim. And, one of the last things
I said is "Okay, you've podiumed
in three classes. What's next?" I want to build
the SVRSR with Scarbo. Joe Scarbo is an engineer designer and the original concept
for the Hoonipigasus is his. Actually, before it was ever named, the idea of taking
an old vintage silhouette and give it the performance
and technology of a modern car. All wheel drive, all of that. What we've pushed out
to a whole other level, the concept
for the Hoonipigasus is to be the ultimate
Pikes Peak 911 Special ever built. November 5th, hoping we're going
to get this project greenlit, pitch the idea to the Hoonigans
and the powers that be. Let's get his project sold
and get to Pikes Peak. He's like, "It's a vintage 911,
but it's all modern tech. It's all the best tech
we can throw at it." So, "Okay, cool. How much is it going to cost?" I told you the number
and you laughed. You actually laughed, and you said, "Nobody's going to want to do
something like that." Who's going to pay for that? How are we going
to put that together? He was like, "Well, I was kind of
hoping you could help me there." I said, "Okay." And, at that time, conveniently,
Ken went over the VAG. That was, I think,
still in the background, but I heard grumblings about it. So, I asked Brian, and I think Vin
was on the call also, I said, "What if Ken drove?" Short of them hanging up on me, called me back a day later,
and said, "He's actually interested." [Engine Revving] When Brian introduced
the concept to me of what the Hoonipig would be, it basically was
the Hoonicorn of Porsches. So, yeah, I'm in. So, most people
in the automotive world should know
the Ken Block story, right? He's the shoe tycoon
who created the Gymkhana films, went on to be a rather
accomplished rally car driver. But, what most people don't know
is what got him there. And, what got him there
was watching Pikes Peak as a kid. The history of Pikes Peak
goes back to the idea of being a kid and looking at magazines,
car magazines and watching things
like ABC's Wide World of Sports. Spanning the globe to bring you
the constant variety of sports. That might have featured like the Pikes Peak
International Hill Climb event. And, they would feature
the cars and people, Ari Vatanen and Michèle Mouton, those drivers
that would be competing. That's where I first
started learning about Audi and all-wheel drive cars. So, that's what got me interested
in rally, that's what got me interested
in Pikes Peak, all in the mid to late '80s. It's very cool that
there were these moments in time that there were records. And, it was such a unique
and different race with a distinct danger to it
that really caught my attention. [Engine Revving] But, ironically, he never has ran
a real campaign at Pikes Peak. He's raced it before when it was
part of the American Rally series, but he's never actually taken a car
that was a Pikes special and gone there to chase a time, to chase a record,
or to win a class. [Engine Revving] All-wheel drive, high horsepower, something that is rally-inspired on not only its design
but how it drives. That makes complete sense to me. I've loved the 911
since I was a very young kid. At Porsche, we don't let you buy a car
unless we've test-driven it first. I got some good news. The project got greenlit. Funds are in place. I'm getting in a car right now and I'm driving down
to Carl's Spot with Joe Scarbo. We're going to pick out
our weapon. Well, we need therapy. A lot of it and fast
because this is her. So... as you can see... need a little scale right there. Yeah, this is great. Nuts. The chassis was built right here
in Southern California at Scarbo Performance. They designed
and built it all in-house. It's built out of over 300 feet
of Chromoly tubing. That's longer than a football field. One fun part about this thing is the engine and transmission
are what we call "stressed member". So, it doesn't actually have
a sub-frame around it. They take a lot of the load
from the back of the car and transfer it right to the front. Once the chassis was fully designed,
Scarbo then got all the tubing in, notched it in-house,
bent it in-house, and it took him from the time
that the truck landed to delivery of the chassis to BBI
it was about 14 days, so it's a lot quicker than I can
build a Lego set with my son. Underneath this already iconic
Trevor Andrew livery, there is some of the most beautiful
carbon fiber work you've ever seen. Everything on this car
was built in Sweden from a bodywork standpoint
except for the metal roof, but everything else has some of
the sexiest carbon fiber work that I've seen in a long time. The coolest part is that
it was all made in Sweden, designed here in the states
by Verus and Scarbo, and then shipped over to California
to our facility where we integrated it
with the guys from Verus and the stuff just fit. And, they did it
in such a short amount of time that as the chassis was being built, the chassis didn't even have
a final design yet, they were already cutting molds
because we had to kick this off from such a short time frame
and they just killed it. So, this timeframe for this car
has been extremely challenging. We've always been on the limit. We call it
the second 59 of a minute, but we're right on second 59.9. So, to be fair to everybody
involved in the project, from the outside,
no one really sees what's happened but it's really been
a four-month project. The evolution of it from going from a '73
badass vintage capable racecar that you can drive on the street to a full-on competitive
Pikes Peak contender, everything had to happen
in parallel, like building a chassis
and redesigning the chassis, moving an engine while bodywork
is already being made. So, well, cut the molds
for the front of the car, we're not going to change that. That's how this went. And, to build a fully prototype car
in four months is incredible. But, honestly, the team
have come together really well, brilliant group of people. We originally wanted to sign it off
at SEMA last year, but that was slightly later, so it really meant that
we didn't start with the project until right into Christmas. And, fair play to have really evolved
in the project. It's been an immense, immense effort
to get where we are right now. Luckily, we have great partners. Luckily, everybody
was so wildly motivated to be a part of this project. Before they even knew
much about it, they said, "Oh your Betim,
you're building a car from scratch with a bunch of your buddies
who you went racing with. That's cool,
I want to be a part of it." Over the years,
we've built these iconic cars that I think have really inspired
so much other stuff. Not just video game cars,
but body kits you see on streetcars, stacks and stacks of canards,
all these things. A lot of this stuff
was developed out of cars that were built to go Pikes. And, this was what when
we looked at the Hoonipigasus project,
it's like we realized, "We're going to get
to build an iconic car." One of the biggest things you notice
on a lot of Pikes Peak cars, and especially the Hoonipigasus
is that the aerodynamic, the look of the aerodynamics
is very, very dramatic because it has about 40 percent
less air density to work with. So, this splitter right here
at sea level, this car will produce
about 4,000 pounds of downforce at 160 miles an hour. Our average speed at Pikes Peak
is going to be right around 80 to 85 miles an hour, and the air density
is about 40 percent less. So, that actually means you have 40 percent less potential
for cooling as well. So, we have to run
a lot larger radiator than we typically have. And then, there's a lot of
design work that goes into, essentially the surface area
the open area versus exit area to get that air through
the radiator and cool it. So, a lot of the air
that doesn't go under the splitter stacks up right on top of here. A lot of it gets forced
through the radiator out here creating downforce because these exit ducts spill up
and over the windshield. And, what you have on the sides
that doesn't go around here, you have these two buttresses
that lead into the three foils. It's actually a fourth foil, which this end of the splitter
is considered one. And, these re-straighten
the air out. The very back one, any of the air that doesn't go
into the wheelwell gets shoved up around here
and out. Because as the air comes up
and over here, you have this flip which creates
a low-pressure zone right here, and you want to evacuate
all the air out of here. And then,
as the air spills out right here, there's a huge inner fender liner
right here that flows the air back around here. And, you have these
what are called barge boards. What these do
is they re-straighten the air out because you have such a difference
from outside track width to door. So, what you want is the air
to come back out here, it re-straightens it out
and sets it back up to go back up and over the fender. The air that goes
underneath the splitter that gets set up
all the way in the front. There's this beautiful diffuser
and a ramp that leads everything down into these strakes right here. The strakes, what they do is
they energize the floor, they clean up the airflow
on the way in. And, you see these little lips
on some of these cars, they serve two purposes
that if the floor hits the bottom and you, guys, heard a lot
of Formula 1 porpoising, well, this allows the air
to still travel underneath the car and keep the back of the diffuser
energized. Because if you close off
all the air, the thing wants to lift back up,
then you get the spring effect. And then, once it comes back up
and gets reenergized, you get this porpoising. And, we've been able
to almost eliminate all porpoising with just having Verus
do all the studies at different right heights. And, a lot of this is
to keep the rear tunnels energized. Anything that comes up
over the top, we've had to smooth out
all of these lines so we don't disrupt too much
air flow over the top of the car because the early 911 is really
actually a hard car to make efficient arrow downforce
without drag. But, there was one thing that
I've gotten a lot of arguments with is I wanted to keep
the iconic gutter rails on here, and these are devastating for aero and Verus and Paul and Eric over there
were yelling at me the whole time. But, I think it needed that
for the look of the car. But, as we come back here, we have the scoop
that feeds the intercooler. And, that solely feeds
the intercooler and that's it. As the air
comes back down over here, you have these big fenders, which are also a pain to keep
air clean and happy over them. So, you get this weird shape
right here that through the CFD work, it actually helps
keep the air attached here without dirtying it up too much
for the wing. But, as the air flows around here, these are the inlets
for each turbocharger, they feed left and right. Turbo charges
would sit right about here. And, you have these
two little NACA ducts down here that actually cool off
the exhaust manifold. Those are plumbed to the manifold, and that bleeds all the way
back off in the bottom of the car. Naturally, air flows over the car. You run into this huge
dramatic wing up here. It's a dual element. So, with the two elements, we are able to generate
more downforce with less drag. And, if you see
this oddly-shaped end plate here, this is primarily for the car, how the aero balance of the car
behaves in yaw. Meaning you can't always just be
going straight in a simulation. So, when the car is turning
or getting a little bit sideways, you have these bleed-offs to help bleed off
the pressure up here and reenergize the wing
in a not-so-ideal state. So, we're going
150 miles an hour now. All the air is going up
and over the car. A lot of times what that will do
is create lift in the back, but we have a huge separation from the outside of the car
to the inside of the car with the floor
and the fender liners. And, if you notice,
we don't have a rear bumper because we have to evacuate
all of that air out of the car. So, this wall right here
separates everything and it seals it to the floor. And, all that air
is flown through here. And, the neat part is
Verus did almost like a CAT scan where they watched
what the air does through the entire vehicle,
not just around it but through it. And, they tweaked so much stuff
to make sure that that was efficient. On the side floor, you have the nice
radius inlets for the diffusers. And, you see
these diffusers right here, they start up by the driver's feet. They're about 8.5-9 feet long, and they generate a lot
of downforce with very, very little drag,
which is very nice. And, being that this is
the theme of an early 911, the duct tail we had to integrate, it's a little bit more dramatic
than the typical one because we actually needed
that to keep the airflow coming up and over here. It actually helps
with the efficiency of the wing down here. It's always a fine margin
between show and performance. So, I think the desire has been
to go onto a competitive car, and that's where we currently are. We started with a '66 912, very loosely started
with one of those. And, as we took the engine
from the back to the middle, that presented a huge issue. Well, how do you run the drive shaft
to the front of the car? And, that's when we realized
no one's ever built a mid-engine
all-wheel-drive 911 before. And, it all comes down
to packaging. There's no room
underneath the car. If you look under there, there is no real estate
to run a drive shaft. Even if you move
the engine up a little bit, then you're really in bad shape. Your axle angles go away. So, packaging everything was a little bit of give
and a little bit take. Well, the big take which sucked, was the drive shaft
had to run through the center of the top of the engine. We always talk about
the drive shaft, too, being the Chorizo Tunnel. But, that tunnel houses
a drive shaft spinning at 8,300 RPMs. We're talking about it
and Ken asked, "Wait, so the drive shaft
is next to me? Can I see it?" I said, "No, you can't see it,
but it's right there. It's basically your armrest." That's very unconventional, and we had to raise the front diff just to get
the drive shaft angles correct. And, when you do that,
you have to raise the rack up and then now you have to move
the radiator forward. So, every single thing is about as close and as tight
as you can do it. Drive train. So, this typical silhouette, the 911 is you're going to find
the engine in the back, the transmission in front of it, so kind of in the middle
of the rear seats. We decided to go mid-engine
halfway through the project, which created a lot of brain damage
in a few respects, but there are a lot
of positives to that. One of the cons though is, how do you run a drive shaft
from the back of the transmission past a horizontally opposed engine
and then to a front differential? The only logical thing
that we came up with where we could package something
is we had to run the drive shaft with a transfer case off the back. All the way in the back
of the transmission, we ran a drive shaft down through
the middle of the engine on the topside. And, that pierces the firewall
right here. And, it goes through
what everybody all calls the Chorizo Tunnel. And, as that drive shaft
comes through, it sits right about here
at your shoulder, which is absolutely frightening. Then, it goes up
to a set of front differential, which you can actually find
that same exact differential in the Hoonicorn, which is in the back of the car. So, we know that thing's strong. I'll give you a better idea of what that Chorizo Tunnel
as an armrest looks like. Check this out. So, when you're sitting in here,
the cockpit is pretty tight but then you have a drive shaft
spinning at 7,500 RPMs right next to your elbow. But, it frames in the cockpit
pretty nicely, you just don't want
to think about it very much. If you notice where the passenger
would typically sit is a 21-gallon methanol tank
made by Premier out in the UK. And, that was commissioned
by Protech who you'll see I'll get into the electronics later,
but you can see all the controllers, the pumps,
and then all plumbed by XRP. The packaging became wild,
so ECUs are here. We just had to find a home
for everything, and we had to find a home
that made the most sense. One thing you won't find
in this packaging is a center differential. So, it is mechanically locked
front to rear, which is relatively unique
to the Porsche world. But, when we have a square setup,
we have the 18 by 13 front wheels, 18 by 13 rears,
and the tires are identical. It actually makes
for a pretty neat package to drive. I'm not trying to say hint-hint
or anything, but if we do ever use this car
from Gymkhana or something neat like that, we will put a center diff and probably a pretty cool
e-brake handle right here. I'm just saying. It might be cool. I think that when we finished
the Climbkhana film, there was a desire to go back
with a competitive vehicle. And, we built the Mustang, really
for Jim Conner, but also it could go up a hill
and it probably could at Goodwood. But, to be competitive
on the hill here with the actual change in direction and change in the way
the sport's gone, we needed something special,
we needed a proper-built car. It became very apparent as soon as
this project started to take some legs
that if we are going to do this, we need to go compete
at the top level. I want an open class win, but let's build something that
could potentially do an overall. But, the future of Pikes Peak
is electric. Whether you like that or not, electric engines
just work better at altitude. They don't deal
with all the problems that you run into
in an internal combustion engine when you're dealing
with air density and all these different things. And, that's one of the reasons
we wanted to build the Hoonipigasus. We knew that the Hoonipigasus
might be the last of an era. It might be the last
big, huge budget because no factory
is building a car like this anymore. I just think
those are going to go away. And, it's one of the reasons
why it was so cool that not only did we do that but we built it
in a vintage silhouette. This may be the last
ridiculously built gas engines as we know it for Pikes Peak. Through the tunnel
and over the hill, I'm just kidding. Through the tunnel
and behind the firewall is where all the magic happens. The engine started life
as a 2016 GT3 R engine. That's a factory Porsche race car
that they ran in IMSA in the FIA-GT3. We decided to go that route
because, well, I mean, the engine's wild,
spins to 9,000 RPMs, has massive ports,
a very, very robust oiling system. This is a dry sump system and they call it
an MA family engine. The cool part is we got to retain
one of the carbon fiber oil tanks from the GT3 R program also, holds about 12.6 liters of oil
and it's really cool to look at. Another piece of information
that really stuck out with me is about how many miles
and hours of testing Porsche has on the bottom end
running Mobil 1 oil. So, Mobil 1 has always been
the factory fill on the GT3 R engine and most all the other engines
that Porsche does. So, when we reached out to Mobil 1,
they told us, "Hey, look, the tech team said these are the clearances
you're going to want to run. This is what
you're going to want to do. This is the oil
you're going to use." And, it all just made sense
to keep everything in that family of endurance and just massive amounts
of mileage and testing. So, boost, it all starts at those wing windows
that we talked about earlier where the quarter glass, typically you'd be able
to look inside the car. That's where an engine is. So, that feeds two Garrett
motorsport turbochargers. They're quite large. They're the biggest actual Garrett motorsport turbocharger
that they've produced and they're unbelievably light. So, that's why we went with them, super light packaging
and tight packaging, which is nice. They are fed by the engine through
the 3D-printed Inconel Headers and a Garrett wastegate. That's what controls
the boost itself through two MAC valves and obviously
back through the M142 ECU. And then, that's fed through
two exhaust pipes that discharge out of the rear deck, also something you couldn't do
with a rear engine car. What makes
this whole package nice and what I'm leaning on
is 21 gallons of methanol. So, the methanol itself, we have three injectors
per cylinder, two of which
are port-mounted injectors and one's a direct injection system that came original
on the GT3 R package. That has a tremendous
cooling effect. Sander from Obsidian, he's the guy who does
all of our setups and calibration and all the wiring. He looked at
the exhaust gas temperatures and they're about 300C cooler
than we were last year running E85. So, we know it's doing its job and keeping a real cool
combustion chamber. That was all designed
by ProTech out in England and they got all their specs
from Sander after he started doing
all of our calculations from what we saw last year that he based
in the fuel burn for methanol. After Sander calculated
what our fuel consumption will be at full throttle at sea level, that would be
1,400 crank horsepower. If we were to hold this thing
at full throttle at 1,400 horsepower, sixth gear wide open,
170 miles an hour, this thing would be consuming
a gallon every 6 seconds. I think when we started the project,
as I said before, we were slightly behind
on signing it off and getting it going
and the kicking in. And, from early on,
I could see that we would be on the second 59 to try
and get to the first test. I think we've picked the absolute
****ing worst time you could think of to build a car from scratch and to do it
in a short amount of time. Supply chain issues. I'm so tired of hearing that. Everybody says it. That's been the biggest thing
is getting stuff in the building. And now, once it's in the building,
now it's within our control. In the ideal world, I mean, they say normally a prototype build
is minimum eight months. When you see what's happening
in the world since COVID and how delivery times
have been penalized so badly, one of the biggest fights
has been to get transmissions, fuel cells, carbon panels, everything you can possibly think of
in place in time just at the right minute
just to continue the build. The scary part is when
the parts started showing up. First scariest moment
was when the project got greenlit and it became real. Second scary part is that
we're waiting, waiting, waiting, doing everything we can
to build things in parallel, like building a wire harness
without a car. Well, that's the PDM. This is the entire nervous system
of the car. That's our ABS pump hooked up,
steering wheel, switch panel, computer, bigger computer Sander. With CAD that changes
every single day like, "Oh, the roll hoop used to be here,
now it's here." So, well, whatever,
make it a little longer. Everything we do on our side,
on the race side, is time-driven, we can't ask the events
to move back, we can't move that kill date. We know that we've got to be
on the hill on the 26th of June at 4 o'clock. If we're not there,
we don't make it. That's a big struggle, because every single person
a part of this project, likes things done
really, really well, and executed with,
I shouldn't say perfection but executed with a level
of pride and finish. The pressure to perform
is tremendous, but that bulls**t aside, you stay focused
and you just keep your head down. And, the goal is
to get to the top of the mountain with a successful nice time. So, we addressed all the fun stuff,
all the aerodynamics, but in order to get
aerodynamics to work and all of the hocus pocus
that goes with it, you need mechanical grip. And, you need mechanical grip
to achieve the speeds, mid-corner and exit,
in order to activate that arrow. So, that all starts here. So, speaking of mechanical grip, you can't just run
any off-the-shelf tire or any off-the-shelf slick because you have
wildly varying conditions, you have cold temperatures,
hot temperatures, low mechanical grip
from dirt on the road, and then you have to have
something that can support the aero loads once you get
up to speed and temperature. Toyo ended up making us two
different compounds for this car, soft and a medium. They ended up
looking at all of our specs, the weight of the car,
the horsepower, the aero loads, even damper curves, motion ratios. They looked at all of that
and they came up with their own sidewall
and compound construction, which actually suited this car
really, really well. It's pretty neat to have Toyo
in our corner and able to do that where typically
if you're with another manufacturer, you get what they have
and they're like, "Let's just make a recipe
for you, guys, and go for it." These Toyos are actually mounted
on a 13-inch Rotiform wheel that was completely custom-made. So, we have about 56 inches
of contact patch. And, that's the most
I've ever run at Pikes Peak. Rotiform came through
in a really, really cool way. They had this wheel custom built
literally a week after we started this project. They looked at
all the theoretical loads, and they asked a lot
of really cool questions about how we're going to do this. And, they built our wheels last year and these are considerably lighter
and a lot stronger because we've never seen forces
generated on a car as much as we were going to do
on this thing. So, Rotiform ended up making us
a pretty unique wheel that has about a 40-millimeter
cross-section to it, so it's wildly deep
in the forging profile but we were able to run
a real thick thin spoke and you got a lot of essentially
I-beam strength out of that. The other part is the hub is
fully drilled out on the back side to minimize weight
but still maximize the strength. And, we have a portion
of the wheel that is about
a credit card distance away from some of the suspension so you have to have
a lot of barrel rigidity. And, trying to keep a wheel light
was pretty challenging for them but they came through. It's an 18 by 13 center lock,
it's only 8.6 kg. So, light, strong, rigid,
it's the best of all worlds. While we're talking
about unsprung mass, let's look at the brakes. It starts with this surface transform
custom ceramic rotor that they built for us
that is almost indestructible on those conditions. The challenging part here
was getting a rotor that's a ceramic rotor
and a pad compound that can start at almost
dead cold temperatures and have tons and tons
of initial bite and then carry through
the heat range all the way up
till they're almost glowing. Usually, I don't care
but the pad and rotor combo is some super-secret trick s**t
that we can't really talk about. The brake caliper
is a six-piston PFC design that's performance friction,
U.S.-made caliper. You find a lot of these on some of
the factory Porsche race cars and we've run them in the past
since 2019, '20, '21 and '22. We've run them every year
at Pikes Peak that we've competed
under our umbrella. So, we typically
look at suspension on this car in three different categories. We look at geometry and kinematics
and construction. We look at dampening
and controlling that with the spring damper package. Then, we look at
active ride height control. I'll get into each one of those. So, geometry-wise, Scarbo fully designed
the suspension and built it in-house
over at Scarbo Performance. And, the cool part about it
is with Pikes Peak, it's unique, it's really bumpy,
you need to generate a lot of grip, you need to have a lot, a kind of a compliant chassis
but a little bit of body roll. Not too much because
you want to maintain platform. So, the way he did that
is playing with roll centers and he actually has a really long
control arm package on this car so you have very, very little
toe change and a little bit of camber gain
under compression but we have about 6 inches
of wheel travel which is more than we've ever done
in any car up there. And, the idea for that is when
you're hitting the big bumps, the tires can go down to the ground
and you're not catching air so you're keeping
that contact patch active. As you look at the corner
the whole upright, the knuckle, is a full bespoke billet thing
that was made at Scarbo as well, all in-house with a camber plate. The cool part is we're able
to adjust camber on the fly without changing toe
just with the shim packs here. And then,
as you run closer up in the car, you have the rocker system, which we have variable
motion ratios that we can change. There's three different positions. We're running it in the middle
right now to get moving. As the wheel travels
up and down that 6 inches, the damper isn't moving 6 inches. So, there's a ratio there
that you want to work with. And, that's how you can calculate
spring rates and loads and all that fun stuff. So, KW really came through. We reached out to them and gave them
the layout of this package. We had a really unique one
with the motion ratios and the amount of wheel travel
we have and we need to control it
really, really well. They built us their new
solid shaft design damper, which is a four-way damper. So, it has two low-speed knobs
and two high-speed knobs. One is for the compression. One is for the rebound. So, you can control low-speed
and high-speed motion of the damper in rebound
and compression all independently. We use all that information
so we understand where the car is as far as the platform and where each wheel
is independently moving. And, it all goes into the MoTec M142
that Obsidian has in there controlling all of
our suspension stuff but I'm going to get
more into that here in a second. The third part about the suspension
that we're talking about is what we call Project Ramrod. Scarbo came up
with a unique design. It's a little agricultural
as we all see, but it works really well. We use a hydraulic ram,
a pump, and a control valve that's all controlled by the MoTec. And, you can utilize this
to maintain ride height as you have
a relatively soft chassis and you start
to go up in elevation and you start
to get a little bit faster and aerodynamic loads, you can change the ride height
of the car and have a targeted ride height and have the car hit it
at all times. We use one laser in the front,
two lasers in the back, and then we use a fifth
and sixth linear potentiometer to monitor the ram position as well. And, this through a control strategy that Obsidian came up with
really is pretty neat. This sounds lame
but one of my favorite parts is that we can raise
and lower the car just to get it into a trailer. So, that's really, really nice
with all the overhang, but that's not what it's there for. It works awesome. I'm looking forward
to really, really pushing some of the electronic side
of the control strategies on this whole package. Not sure what time it is, but it's not late tonight,
it's early tomorrow. The guys are wrapping the car now. It's looking good. It's really good. I'll show you a sneak peek. But, by the time you see this video, you've definitely already seen
this car all over the place. Hopefully, you've seen this thing
racing too by now. But, check it out. It's coming along. Looking good. We knew that the actual build
for the Hoonipig was going to be art in itself. It's one of the craziest builds
I've ever seen. And, I've been around
a lot of amazing builds from the Hoonicorn to the Warthog
we've done here, but we knew that we needed
to do something with the Hoonipig to really set it off. We started talking about liveries. I mean, you look at this thing
in bare carbon and you almost
don't want to cover it. It was so sexy as it sat. We wanted to give it something that really took it
to the next level. Enter Trouble Andrew. Trevor Andrew, Gucci Ghost, his backstory is he was
an Olympic level snowboarder turned musician, turned artist who eventually started
working with Gucci, became known as Gucci Ghost and oddly traveled
in all the same circles as both myself and Ken. We have all these mutual friends. Well, when I was going through
Trouble Andrew's original art, he had a big variety
of different things. One of them was a
really bright pink version of a livery on a car. And, I brushed it off because I thought
there were better things, right? I immediately connected with pink
and you got to look back at the 917 and realize that the Porsche
was called the Porker and it was known as the pig. The Germans celebrated it
with this particular livery. And, it's one of these
famous liveries and in a weird way, even though Trevor
knew nothing about that livery, it all just packaged together. There's something about the livery that has a f*** you
punk rock element to it that you just wouldn't expect that to be on a world-class
Porsche build. And, that's my favorite part
of the whole thing. When the car was revealed in L.A.,
it was incredible. I had never been
to a reveal like that and I didn't know what to expect, and my family and friends
were all there and they're like, "Holy s**t, this is real." And, that was the point where now it's in front
of the public's eye. There are no options
to not show up. Now, it's look,
"Dig down, dig deeper." What you thought you were doing
a lot of work, now turn it up. And, it put a level of precedence
to the entire effort. It showed me how much
everybody believed in this. And, see where we get... Okay, so here we are,
Monday, 23rd of May, and progress is doing really well
with the car. We won't be testing tomorrow. It's just not going
to reach out that far, so we're, yeah,
boys are working flat out, been working over the weekend,
and progress is really good but fabrication work takes so long
on these cars' prototypes. So, we're going to push
the test back slightly to try and get the car done
rather than go test it and come back
and having to do more work and have the car complete. So, playing about with the schedule,
but BBI doing a great job, the boys here
are flat out working on it. So, yeah, she's getting there. We'll be testing
the hydraulics up here shortly, power steering will be tested. Electronics are tested. So, I'm just cranking. Now, we're going to talk about
the thing that I understand the least about
on this car. It's called electronics. And, the wizardry that happens
behind the keyboards and the puck and everything like that,
and they just say, "Hey, Sander,
can you make this happen?" All of a sudden, the car just does
something different is... it's a lot. So, early on in the project, we had essentially
a huge amount of information that we needed from the car. And, to handle that,
I just asked Sander from Obsidian, I said, "Hey, bud,
this is what we're going to do, I need you to spec it out. You have free reins on this thing. You're going to do
whatever you want because I don't know enough
to actually tell you what this thing needs." So, he said,
"I got you, say no more." And, he went to town on this. So, he enlisted MoTec for the ECUs,
Bosch for the PDM, which is right here. And, that's what controls
all the power distribution. The ECU is one of which controls
the engine and transmission, the other one controls
the entire chassis. They both pull information
from every single sensor on here, aggregates it, and they're able
to lay out data screens. And, you can ask them
anything say, "Hey, I want to know about
any lag." There's a screen
with so many different things, a lot of squiggly lines and he said,
"This is what it's doing." Then you have to have
all of that stuff communicate. And, that's done on a CAN bus. And, what that does
is that sends information across two wires to each module
and sensors and all that fun stuff. And, we have one of the longest
CAN buses that they've ever made, which had a few challenges
in itself. In order to connect everything, Sander reached out to one
of his close friends, Kevin, at KSV. And, KSV decided to take
4.5 miles of wire. If you took every wire end to end,
it'd be about 4.5 miles worth in this whole mega spaceship
of a car that we've done. I think it's impressive. He used really, really high-quality
lightweight wire. And, that was something
that we had zero problems with. That's another thing
that just showed up. We plugged everything in. Sander had to tweak it
because a lot of things happened and were designed in parallel
so we didn't have a car when Sander was laying out
the harness. And, he had to do it in CAD
and in space and theoreticals, where we going to put things. And then,
halfway through the build, Sander is like, "Oh, the fuel cells
where I wanted this." And so, we had to improvise, but they've done an incredible job
on this thing. And, like I said, it's the thing
I understand the least amount is probably the most impressive
thing in this car. Alright, so today is supposed to be
loading day, which means this thing's supposed
to be headed to Pikes today. So, anyway,
I just came to drop off donuts. That was really it. That's all my job is today. I heard these guys
pulled an all-nighter last night. They got everything
to put it back together right now. I think we're in the middle
of doing systems check and putting all this stuff back on. Came down with the little dude
and getting ready and see these guys in Colorado
in a week. May 30th, heading out,
car's wrapped up. We're going to go test
in the next few days. We got a track rented for two days to test and shake all the bugs
out of this thing prior to our official tire test,
which is June 4th and 5th. And, we're going to learn a lot. I mean, it's going to be
a complete fact-finding mission. There's a lot of new things
on this car, but we're excited. Pikes is one of the most extreme
and unique events that we have here in America,
if not the whole world. Not only is it you versus nature
in one of the scariest situations, not only is the environment
taxing on the car but also the human as well. It's cold, it's hot,
you're light-headed, you're tired, it's just a barrage
and attack on all your senses. But, people spend an entire year building cars,
training for this testing to get there and have one chance,
just one shot. You don't get a second chance. You don't. You just get to stew on it
for the next year. You don't get to blow
the fifth corner and be like, "Ah, wait, I need to go back. I blew that one
so I want to start over." There's none of that. You either crash out on turn two
or you make it to the top and you carry the flag down. If you're lucky,
you get to make it to the top. And, if you're really lucky,
you get to do well. You work for a year straight
trying to figure this out and you're imagining
every single day what it feels like to win or lose. And then, nothing really matters
because halfway up your run, it could rain on you. And, it won't rain
on your competitor who's 10 minutes behind you
or 10 minutes in front of you. I've been a part of that. So, the Pikes Peak
International Hill Climb takes place
at the Pikes Peak Highway, which is actually a tourist road. Anyone can go there
on a regular day, pay and drive to the top. But, the actual race takes place
on the last 156 or so turns. It stretches for 12.42 miles. The top of that mountain
is 14,000 feet. There's very little oxygen. So, I train here at home. I live at 7,000 feet. I ride my bike at 10,000 feet. That is what makes this so special
because this is painful. It sucks to spend time up there
as a human. Cars don't make as much power. Everything works different. The air is so thin
that aerodynamics work different. At the end of the day, when we race,
there's an incredible team effort. But, at a certain point on Sunday
late in June, that team effort stops
and I get in the car and it's on me. I have to learn the lines,
I have to learn the breaking points, I have to give the feedback
to the team of what the car is and isn't doing. So, it really is a thing
that weighs heavily on myself that I have to be ready
and prepared. Because if I'm not doing my job,
nobody else can do their job and our end result
won't be what it should be. But, also if the car isn't developed
and at the right level, I can't do my job
at the maximum level. I swear if you plan for s**t
to go right, you're an idiot. You have to plan for adversity. And, whatever you're planning for, that's going to be 40 percent of what
you actually have to go through. [Engine Starts] [Engine Revs] Sunday morning, we wake up,
we go to tech, made it through tech swimmingly. Get to Pueblo,
we addressed a few things, power on the engine,
gearing, and suspension. All three of those things
first lap out showed positive movements
in every direction. So, it gave us a lot of hope. The car sounded great. I was watching Ken come out
of this first gear hairpin where before it was bogging,
and this thing was just digging in. [Engine Revving] It looked like it was almost pulling the front inside tire
off the ground. And, I watched him into a corner,
wide open throttle, I think he just sat back
and he went through three gears and the car was still turning,
just everything looked great. Came back in, tires looked good,
but there was a sound. When Derek and I
were standing there, the car came by,
under full throttle sounded great, and then, when he drove by us
going back to the pits, like something... I got a pit in my stomach. I had an issue yesterday
with the over-revving of the engine unfortunately which damaged it
and we paid the price and had our test cut short,
which was a big drama because we had just made some good
progress with gear ratios. And then, this morning, we've had the same thing happen
on the other bank of cylinders. So, it's curtailed our testing. So, it really puts us
on the back foot completely. [Engine Revving] If he comes back and he's happy,
it's good, we've turned the corner. So, big effort to get here. So, brilliant result. Let's just see if
we can push on with that today and carry on successfully. [Engine Revving] Battery light was on
the whole time. I had similar power as last time. Okay. Well, unfortunately, right at about mid-way
up his first run, the car sounded great
leaving the line. Everything sounded good. And, when he came back down,
I heard it, the car was running
on five cylinders. It sounded angry. I was like, "Damn it." But, he drove it down. He was like, "Yeah. It just has a misfire." I heard it, and I was like,
"Oh, we're done." So, we loaded the car back up, got back down here, and just immediately
tore into the car. We find out the engine's broken. And, from a hopeful standpoint,
I start racking my brain, the whole team
starts putting their heads together. What is it going to take
to fix this? We knew we needed a head because we knew
that head was scrapped. We knew we needed a piston. We lost the turbo because a chunk of the valve
took it out and these are one-off turbos
that Garrett made. Just so happens they made
some extra parts, so there was hope. I was like, "Okay, we can do this." So, Derek met me here at 2:00 a.m. and we saw the scoring
on the cylinder and there's a big dent
right in the middle, two big dents. One is far down the bore
which I could live with, but the other one
was in the quench right in the tight part
of the compression cycle or the compression stroke. I'm like, "We can't run this." Because I've tried it before, I know what happens. It's really tricky to try
and get everything lined up with a prototype car. So, normally,
we have an eight-month period, we've done it in four months, and you really need all the stars
to line up to make sure it works. You have to pay respect
to this hill. And, if you're one step out,
it will bite you. And, it's really bitten us
really hard, and I feel sorry for everybody
that supported it and everybody that's put
all the effort into it. But, we don't want to give up, but we're struggling at the moment
big time to just make it
a safe option for Ken to get him up the hill
and to do justice to the amount of effort
people put in. So, the good news is we have a year
to think about this thing, develop it further,
build a spare engine, and just look back
at what we've learned in the last five, six months, apply that to the next year so we'll come back stronger
and better. I'm not mad about it, I was supposed to retire
from Pikes Peak this year, and that's not going to happen.
