In 1994, a 22-year-old Swede named Christian von Koenigsegg booted up his IBM 486 and opened Microsoft Paint. He draughted a yellow, mid-engine supercar with two seats, a wraparound windshield, and a removable roof. This year, the company he founded celebrates its 30th birthday. Its cars still look a lot like that first sketch, and they’ve succeeded in putting the country of Sweden on the radar of supercar fans around the world.
If you’re a fan of high-dollar exotics, you have probably heard of Koenigsegg. If you’re more interested in how cars work than what rich people drive, hang with us. Koenigsegg has quite the technological resume: Its first car boasted a highly modified Audi V8 that, in 2002, was the world’s most powerful production engine. (Today, Koenigsegg uses Ford V8s.) The company designed an electric motor that weighs 86 pounds and makes 800bhp; hollow carbon-fibre wheels; a 2.0-litre three-cylinder engine that makes 600bhp with no camshaft; and a wild transmission that can be a gated six-speed manual or an automatic.
Koenigsegg currently makes four cars: Two variants of the mid-engine, two-seat Jesko (one optimised for straight-line speed, the other for road courses); a throwback model called CC850, limited to 70 units, and a mid-engine, four-seat two-door called the Gemera, of which 300 will be made.
Some of the company’s most important, previous models include the Agera, made in various configurations between 2010 and 2018. In 2017, an Agera RS became the world’s fastest production car with a two-way average of 278mph. In 2005, the CCR broke the top speed record set at the Nardó Ring in 1998 by the McLaren F1 – a car from which Christian von Koenigsegg took much inspiration. In 2006, the CCX appeared on Top Gear and set a record at its test track that stood for seven years.
Koengsegg’s first production model was the CC8S. The alphanumeric stood for Competition Coupe V8 Supercharged, and it debuted at the Geneva motor show in 2003. The prototype, the CC, had debuted in production form at Paris the year before and was the sacrificial lamb, of sorts, subjected to the crash tests that allowed Koenigsegg to homologate the car for sale in global markets.
All of the cars trace back to the dream that was sparked in young Koenigsegg when he watched a stop-motion film with his dad called Pinchcliffe Grand Prix. Give part one a watch below – the quality of production is great and it’s delightful:
