Koenigegg has vowed never to make a faster car than the wild Jesko Absolut. This feisty 1,600-horsepower hypercar has now had its first day out on an empty airstrip – and it brought home the bacon, including the coveted 0-400-0 km/h world record.
This nutty idea, as far as we can tell, was pioneered by Bugatti with the Chiron, back in 2017. The idea is simple: stomp the loud pedal, then stomp the Nanna pedal. You start from a standstill, accelerate to 400 km/h as hard as you can, then immediately hit the brakes and stop as fast as possible. The clock starts when you take off, and stops when you wrestle the car back to a standstill.
Compared to a hot lap at a racetrack, it's less of a test of the driver, and more of a high-stress validation of the car's traction control, stability control and anti-lock braking. But certainly, going from full gas to full brakes at four times highway speed takes no small measure of courage and skill.
This (and the adjacent 0-250-0 mph world record) gives hypercar manufacturers something they can go out and compete for in relative safety – as opposed to the outright two-way production car top speed record, which is now approaching 500 km/h and 300 mph.
There's next to nowhere you can go to push that kind of speed; SSC had a stab four years ago on a 7-mile (11.2-km) section of shut-down public highway outside Vegas, then was forced to retract its claims after internet sleuths poked holes in the timekeeping.
0-400-0 is a doddle in comparison; you can get it done in just a couple of miles' worth of road, so you can hire out a lovely big airstrip and do it in safety and relative privacy. Bugatti was lucky it set the first record, at 42 seconds, because Koenigsegg saw that and said 'oh, that's a thing?' A few weeks later, the Koenigsegg Agera knocked about five seconds off the record with a 37.28, and it was on.
Here's the brief history of the 0-400-0 km/h record, as best we can tell:
- 2017: Bugatti Chiron, 42 seconds
- 2017: Koenigsegg Agera, 37.28 seconds
- 2019: Koenigsegg Regera, 31.49 seconds
- 2023: Rimac Nevera, 29.94 seconds
- 2023: Koenigsegg Regera, 28.81 seconds
And now:
- 2024: Koenigsegg Jesko Absolut, 27.83 seconds – watch:
As founder Christian von Koenigsegg explains, this isn't the record the Jesko Absolut was built for; its super-slippery aerodynamics are designed specifically to break the outright production car speed record.
Thus, it's all about straight-line speed; it runs a 9-speed, multi-clutch 'light speed transmission' that can jump from any gear to any other in "virtually zero time," and it doesn't have the huge active rear wing that the standard Jesko and Regera have.
As a result, it suffers a bit under brakes, since it doesn't have a great big flip-up air brake to help the poor tires out. Indeed, the Jesko Absolut was roughly a second slower in the braking section than the Regera – but it accelerated so dang fast that it didn't matter in the end. Factory test driver Markus Lundh brought home the following swag of records, verified by Racelogic HQ:
- 0-400-0 km/h – 27.83 seconds
- 0-400 km/h – 18.82 seconds
- 0-250-0 mph – 28.27 seconds
- 0-250 mph – 19.20 seconds
Which is all well and good, but how about that official top speed mark? Rumor has it, this extraordinary machine is theoretically capable of somewhere around 330 mph (531 km/h), given enough straight road, perfect weather and a driver with nerves and cojones of steel.
"We all know what this is supposedly capable of in top speed," says von Koenigsegg, "and we need that setup. And of course, we wanna talk about the top speed record as well. We've done a lot of preparation. Now it's really down to the tires, to have the tires approved for the speed. And then we'll be ready to go. So we're hoping that can happen in the very near future as well."
Godspeed, you magnificent lunatics. We'll see you on the other side.
Source: Koenigsegg
