In September 2023, Koenigsegg took their Jesko megacar to a circuit on the Swedish island of Gotland for marketing purposes. Then, they accidentally set a record-breaking lap.
Hadn’t the One:1 already done that years ago? Up until the Senna, it held the production car lap record at Spa for quite a while. Also Suzuka, I believe.
They left a lot on the table and neither Suzuka or Spa are traditional benchmark tracks like the Ring and Laguna Seca. I’m guessing they want a do-over seeing how they crashed the One:1 doing their record attempt at the Ring and only 7 of those were made so they couldn’t just get another one. They had to wait for a like half a year, a year for the track to open up after it got shut down as well. And crashed their Agera R test bed after a hitting a oil slick at over 300 km/h.
I remember at the time guys from the Koenigsegg community did frame by frame comparisons with other known record attempt footage from the 918 and P1 through Brunchen and the Agera R test bed with One:1 components was flying through Brunchen at a comparative 6:40:ish pace. JF Musial, the creator of /Drive and director of Apex: The Story of the Hypercar (which documented Koenigsegg’s record attempts), later also claimed they’d been at a 6:30 pace when they stitched their best sections together but couldn’t put a full optimized lap together before the crash. Imagine a One:1 time of 6:30 though. The auto world would’ve gone absolutely insane. And that was on the old Cup 2 tyres, not even the new Rs. So I bet they’re itching and now they do have extra cars to crash (which is more or less the norm on the Ring, the Germans go through several cars and spend months or even years setting up camp at the Ring to optimize their lap times, so it was pretty naive of Koenigsegg to go down there and think they could one-shot it, even if they came pretty close).
It’s worth mentioning though that McLaren had a P1 and a full factory team at SPA shortly after the One:1’s track record and wasn’t able to break the record until several years after with the Senna. And that record wasn’t not an optimized run either since they got kicked out by track official for noise restrictions when they were attempting the actual record run.
They left a lot on the table and neither Suzuka or Spa are traditional benchmark tracks like the Ring and Laguna Seca. I’m guessing they want a do-over seeing how they crashed the One:1 doing their record attempt at the Ring and only 7 of those were made so they couldn’t just get another one. They had to wait for a like half a year, a year for the track to open up after it got shut down as well. And crashed their Agera R test bed after a hitting a oil slick at over 300 km/h.
I remember at the time guys from the Koenigsegg community did frame by frame comparisons with other known record attempt footage from the 918 and P1 through Brunchen and the Agera R test bed with One:1 components was flying through Brunchen at a comparative 6:40:ish pace. JF Musial, the creator of /Drive and director of Apex: The Story of the Hypercar (which documented Koenigsegg’s record attempts), later also claimed they’d been at a 6:30 pace when they stitched their best sections together but couldn’t put a full optimized lap together before the crash. Imagine a One:1 time of 6:30 though. The auto world would’ve gone absolutely insane. And that was on the old Cup 2 tyres, not even the new Rs. So I bet they’re itching and now they do have extra cars to crash (which is more or less the norm on the Ring, the Germans go through several cars and spend months or even years setting up camp at the Ring to optimize their lap times, so it was pretty naive of Koenigsegg to go down there and think they could one-shot it, even if they came pretty close).
It’s worth mentioning though that McLaren had a P1 and a full factory team at SPA shortly after the One:1’s track record and wasn’t able to break the record until several years after with the Senna. And that record wasn’t not an optimized run either since they got kicked out by track official for noise restrictions when they were attempting the actual record run.
Thanks for the brief history, I hadn’t known a lot of this!