Automotive polymath Christian Von Koenigsegg doesn’t strike me as a man to take risks. Yet on August 18 he arrived at the Laguna Seca racetrack with a car and driver, neither of whom had ever seen the track before. Driver Markus Lundh wasn’t completely unprepared, Mr. Von K said; he had done a few laps on a Playstation.
Koenigsegg founded the legendary hypercar company from scratch in 1994, and since then it's put out an embarrassing list of automotive milestones both sublime and ridiculous: the Light Speed transmission, a 310-mph (500 km/h) dynamometer test, a single-speed hybrid hypercar that can reach 250 mph (403 km/h), the Autoskin button (below) that unlocks a car like a Swiss army knife, a catalytic converter that gives you an extra 300 horsepower… And records. All records.
These multimillion-dollar machines are ultra-high-speed street cars; they're not built to be raced. So we viewed Jesko's trip to Laguna Seca as little more than a PR stunt, a way to clear the cobwebs and show off the car's immense capabilities ahead of a rumored attempt at the hypercar world's top prize: the World Production Car top speed record.
Koenigsegg Regera 'Automatic Leather'
It was a ‘stunt’ of sorts. Jesko Attack ran the 2.2-mile Laguna Seca course in 1:24.86, 0.58 seconds off the lap record set by Czinger 21C in 2021.
Disturbingly, the little birdie at the barrier suggests that the driver would certainly be better off if he had more experience on the track and kept things more tidy through Turns 2, 4 and 11. Could have taken 1-1.5 more seconds off your timeStill, hats off to Lundh for a great debut on California's most famous race track, including the 'corkscrew' that sent his guts flying out of Turn 8 at Jesko's speeds.
Not a bad effort for someone who describes himself as having “no racing background.” Check it out:
KOENIGSEGG Jesko | Laguna Seca Tour Record
The Jesko Attack is essentially the same car as the Absolut version, but the original rear wing piece has been re-added, giving it a total of 3,086 lb (1,400 kg) of maximum downforce; the Absolut is a straight-line beast focused solely on maximum speed, so it needs to reduce drag more than it does downforce.
We've mentioned Jesko before, so I'll give a quick summary of d'numbers.
The Attack is powered by a 5.0-litre, twin-turbo aluminium V8 engine producing 1,600 hp (1,193 kW) using E85, 1,106 lb.ft (1,500 Nm) of torque at 5,100rpm and is fitted with an in-house designed and built 9-speed Lightweight Fast Transmission (LST). Curb weight is 3,131 lb (1,420 kg).
I've been following von Koenigsegg since the jaw-dropping launch of the CC8V in 2010. At the time, a relatively unknown TV personality, J. Clarkson, crowned the model “…very, very special… It may be a Swede, but it's not a Turnip!”
Koenigsegg
My personal admiration for Christian is as much for his car as for his lineage; he may have come from a Roman-era German noble knight with a modest castle bearing his family coat of arms and ancestral surname; yet he still had the courage and audacity to start his own supercar company at the age of 22, having already made enough money from his previous business ventures to largely finance the company himself.
His engineering genius and passion for achieving what many others like John DeLorean failed to do, namely building a Super/Hyper/Megacar from scratch in a ridiculously short time frame, reminds me of Carrol Shelby, perhaps, minus the title.
I would love to see Koenigsegg and Jesko take the title of the world's fastest production car, and reach 310 mph (500 km/h) in the process, and that's certainly both a possibility and a focus for the team in the coming weeks and months. As a very famous colleague of mine used to say – God help you, you magnificent lunatics.
Source: Koenigsegg