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Will Roegge makes 4K art of Jeff Zwart's 911 build and run up Pikes Peak

Will Roegge has turned his camera on Jeff Zwart and provided another gem, this time documenting Zwart's run up Pikes Peak and BBI Autosport. Bertim Besha dropped out of high school, then worked his way up to founding his own shop, BBI, that gathers a crew of tuners who are just as fastidious about their work as the customers are about their cars.
They prepped the 991-series Porsche 911 GT3 Cup Turbo, the product of combining a 911 GT2 that was the most powerful car Zwart drove up the mountain with a GT3 Cup that Zwart thought had the best handling. Two TiAL turbos and a lot of fettling make for a 3.8-liter flat-six with 700 horsepower, 700 pound-feet of torque and a 7,800-rpm redline. Zwart drove it to a heartbreaking second place this year, finishing less than 1.2 seconds behind the Time Attack 1 class winner when his car suffered its first mechanical issue of the week.
The first video below covers Besha, BBI and the build, the second is Zwart's run. As if the visuals weren't enough, sit back and enjoy the shrieking of the "Hill Climb Special," which is what the constellation Sirius would sound like if it could bark.

Audi CEO says brand's EVs are almost as profitable as its other cars

After, oh, a hundred years or so of building vehicles primarily powered by internal combustion engines, automakers around the world have been and still are pumping billions of dollars into the development of electric vehicle technology. Everything from platforms and batteries to motors and the software to control it all requires untold hours of development, and that takes time and money. Fortunately, it's not going to take long for that massive investment to start paying off, at least according to Audi CEO Markus Duesmann, who told Reuters in an interview that "The point where we earn as much money with electric cars as with combustion engine cars is now, or ... next year, 2023. They are very even now, the prices." As a brand, Audi contributed more than a quarter of overall profit for the massive Volkswagen Group, which has such powerhouse brands as Volkswagen and Porsche among others. Under the Audi umbrella are Lamborghini, Bentley and Ducati, and it seems those high-end branches aren't going anywhere, at least for now. "These brands ... are very valuable very profitable brands, where we can even expand the synergy level in the future," Duesmann said in the interview. "There are no plans whatsoever to get rid of them." Despite the overall profitability of the brand, the ongoing global chip crisis is causing headaches. "We had a very strong first half in 2021. We do expect a much weaker second half," said Duesmann, who added, "We really have trouble." In fact, so serious is the trouble that the brand is forced into "a day-to-day troubleshooting process" to limit the chip-shortage damage. The good news for the automaker is that Audi has been able to boost its profit margin from 8% prior to the pandemic in 2019 to 10.7% in the first half of 2021. The bad news is that various chip shortages aren't expected to get a whole lot better over the rest of the year. Related video:

What's the deal with comedians and their cars?

'Round about the time in his life when it should happen for all of us, Jerry Seinfeld's ship came in with a force that almost split the dock. He'd been doing pretty well with his observational style ("There's a cereal now that's just cookies. Have you seen this? Cookies for breakfast. It's called Cookie Crisp. Cookies for breakfast! They oughta just call it 'To Hell With Everything!'"). But he showed no signs of setting the world on fire until he got cast in a show that was either about – depending on the level of comedy geek you ask – the average New Yorker, the very worst people in the world, or nothing. Suddenly Jerry Seinfeld was pretty much the center of the comedy universe. And while his comedy was at once both brilliantly innovative and rooted in the mundane, his next move was a predictable grab at something exotic – he went out and bought his dream car. A rather nice 911, actually. As almost everyone knows, it didn't stop there, and the man put together one of the most enviable collections of iconic Porsches we're likely to see. So what's the connection, if there is one, between cars and comedy? As far as Jerry Seinfeld (the man) is concerned, he's probably not the same guy as the Jerry on Seinfeld (the show) although it's hard to say for sure; his public persona is almost unnervingly well managed. But cars and comedy were the constants in his life then, and, well, just look at what the guy does now; Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee is a cultural constant, and we're certainly seeing Seinfeld the man in that one, and cars are obviously still central to his life. And it's been that way with a lot of very, very good comedy guys. Cars seem to round out their lives, to become the yin to their comedy yang. Ernie Kovacs might not have invented visual gags or surreal humor, but he got them both to kill on television in the 1950s, so he's a comedy hero. He died behind the wheel of his beloved Corvair wagon, so he's absolutely some kind of car-guy hero as well. Bill Cosby, the hottest name in comedy for a good long while, had Ferraris, one of two fire-breathing supercharged big-block Cobras (pictured below), and a BMW 2002tii – none of which either contributed to or in any way make up for the profoundly sociopathic creature he turned out to be, but it's still a data point. The Smothers Brothers, who defied the networks and the norms by getting blatantly political before that sort of thing was cool, went sports car racing.