Watch the Record-Breaking Run of Faraday Future's FF 91 at Pikes Peak

In case you've shut off any news about the startup since the last months of 2016, then you've missed quite a lot. To put it plainly, Faraday Future has lost its main financial backing from Jia Yueting's LeEco Chinese empire, so with a few working prototypes and a big hole in the Nevada desert where its factory should be, it is now looking for potential investors.

They've shown the FF 91 prototype at the start of 2017 in Las Vegas, and even though not everybody is on board with the design, the electric crossover certainly is one of the more accomplished battery-powered concepts we've seen lately. And it also appears to be half-finished, which is more than we can say about most of the rest.

But Faraday Future also set off with very big ambitions, and now that the cash has stopped flowing, it needs to come up with significant sums of money. We're talking billions of dollars here, and no matter how promising your prototype looks and how attractive the EV market is, that's still a frightening amount of cash.

Setting a new record for a production (-ready) EV at Pikes Peak certainly helped Faraday Future's case, especially since the FF 91, with its crossover body shape, is even less of a race car than the Model S. With a time of 11:25:083, the FF 91 beat the Tesla by more than 23 seconds, but we'd be surprised if somebody won't bring a P100D next year to try and get the record back.

Robin Shute, a British GT Championship driver, was the man behind the FF 91's wheel, and he sounds as if he's enjoyed each of the 156 turns of the race. You can listen to a short interview with him at the start of the clip below as footage of the run unfolds in the background. The video contains the entire climb, which is a joy to watch - if only the organizers didn't force the team to use those annoying car alarm sounds.