Christian Von Koenigsegg, polymath of the automotive world, doesn't strike me as a man to take chances. Yet on August 18 he turned up at the Laguna Seca race track with a car and driver, neither of which had ever seen the track in the flesh. The driver, Markus Lundh, wasn't completely unprepared, said Mr Von K; he'd cranked out a few laps on a Playstation.
Koenigsegg started his storied hypercar company from scratch back in 1994, and has since laid out an embarrassment of automotive milestones both sublime and ridiculous – the Light Speed gearbox, the 310 mph (500 km/h) dyno test, the single-speed hybrid hypercar that goes 250 mph (403 km/h), the Autoskin button that opens a car up like a Swiss Army knife (below), the catalytic converter that gives you an extra 300 horsepower... And the records. All the records.
These multi-million-dollar machines are ultra-high-speed street cars; they're not built for racing. So we didn't see the Jesko's trip to Laguna Seca as much more than a PR stunt. A way of blowing out some cobwebs and teasing the immense capabilities of the car prior to a rumored attempt at the grand prize of the hypercar world: the World Production Car top speed record.
Some 'stunt' it was. The Jesko Attack ran the 2.2-mile Laguna Seca course in 1:24.86, taking a clean 0.58 seconds seconds off the lap record set by the Czinger 21C in 2021.
Disturbingly, a little birdie on the crash barrier tells me that for sure, if the driver had more experience of the track, and kept things tidier through corners 2, 4 and 11, he could have taken a further 1-1.5 seconds off his time. Still, hats off to Lundh for a spectacular first crack at California's most famous racetrack, complete with the plunging 'corkscrew' at turn 8 that must've sent his guts up into his mouth at Jesko speeds.
Not a bad little effort for a man that describes himself as "not from a racing background." Take a look:
The Jesko Attack is basically the same car as the Absolut variant, but with the original slab of a rear wing reinstated, giving an overall peak downforce of 3,086 lb (1,400 kg); the Absolut is a straight-line beast focused solely on maximum velocity, so it needs to reduce drag more than it needs downforce.
We have covered the Jesko before so I'll just give a quick summary of d'numbers.
The Attack seats a 5.0-liter, twin-turbo aluminum V8 producing 1,600 bhp (1,193 kW) using E85, 1,106 lb.ft (1,500 Nm) of torque @ 5,100rpm, and equipped with the in-house designed and produced 9-speed Light Speed Transmission (LST). The kerb weight is 3,131 lb (1,420 kg).
I've followed Von Koenigsegg since the jaw-dropping launch of the CC8V in 2010, when a little-known TV guy called J. Clarkson crowned it as "... very very special.... It may be a Swede but it's not a Turnip!"
And personally, my admiration is as much for Christian as the car; he may be descended from Roman-era knights of German nobility, with a family coat of arms and a modest castle bearing his ancestral surname, but he still had the audacity and cojones to start his own supercar company as a 22 year-old – by which point he'd already made enough money on prior business ventures to largely finance the company himself.
His engineering brilliance and passion in achieving what many, like John DeLorean, couldn't – producing Super/Hyper/Megacars from scratch in a ridiculously short time frame – reminds me perhaps of Carrol Shelby, minus the head covering.
I'd love to see Koenigsegg and the Jesko claim the title of world's fastest production car, breaking 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 colleague so famously said - godspeed, you magnificent lunatics.
Source: Koenigsegg
