Koenigsegg Agera

The Agera is Christian von Koenigsegg's own shape, and it reads as the CC line rethought rather than replaced. The proportions are familiar, the dihedral synchro-helix doors and the roof that stows under the front lid are unchanged in principle, and the ghost badge sits where it always has. What is new is the detail work: a bigger active rear wing mounted to work with the diffuser rather than against it, wheels developed as hollow one-piece carbon Aircore items, and cooling arranged for turbochargers rather than superchargers. The One:1 is the sharpest expression, with a roof scoop feeding the engine, a fixed high-mounted wing and enough visual aggression to make the base car look civil. Inside, the Agera moved to digital instrumentation and a cleaner architecture, and the bespoke programme grew to the point where individual cars carry their own names, finishes and stitched details. The cars called Naraya, Hundra, Draken and Zijin are the same engineering wearing one owner's brief, which is a very different way of designing than the CC8S was built under.

Koenigsegg has never entered a race series, and the Agera is the generation where the company made a virtue of it. Its competition record is a series of timed runs. On 4 November 2017 Niklas Lilja drove an Agera RS along a closed 11-mile stretch of Nevada State Route 160 between Las Vegas and Pahrump, recording 284 mph in one direction and 271 in the other for a Racelogic-verified two-way average of 277.87 mph, or 447.19 km/h. A month earlier the same model had run 0 to 400 km/h and back to rest in 36.44 seconds at Vandel in Denmark, then improved that to 33.29 seconds. In 2014 factory driver Robert Serwanski lapped Suzuka in a One:1 in 2 minutes 17.57 seconds, quicker than the production car benchmark of the time, although the company was candid that the run was made at demonstration pace, on petrol rather than E85, with worn tyres and a passenger aboard. No Agera has raced in any series. The car set the terms of the argument instead of entering one.

The Nevada run put a Swedish company on the front of newspapers that do not usually cover cars, and it also broke the rulebook. The recognised production car speed record had required a minimum of 25 cars built, and the Agera RS was found not to qualify under the criteria then in use because so few cars anywhere have engines rated above 865 kW. Rather than exclude the fastest car, the record's custodians dropped the 25-car minimum and replaced it with new criteria drawn up on suggestions from Koenigsegg's own PR manager, Steven Wade. Top Gear had already named the Agera its Hypercar of the Year for 2010, before any of the records. The One:1 gave the language a new word when Koenigsegg described a car making a full megawatt as a megacar, a term the industry adopted with varying degrees of irony. And the Agera R became the generation's video game star, appearing in Need for Speed Most Wanted in 2012 and in the Forza series, which is how most people under thirty first encountered the marque.

The Agera is the first Koenigsegg that behaves like a modern car in daily terms, and it brings modern liabilities with it. The dual clutch gearbox is a bespoke unit built in tiny numbers, so it is serviced by the factory and its history matters more than its mileage. The active rear wing and its actuators are worth inspecting properly, as is any car that has seen track use, which these did far more than the earlier models. Fuel is a live issue rather than a footnote: an Agera R or RS makes its headline figure only on E85, and ethanol is not available everywhere, so owners plan around supply and pay attention to how long the fuel has been sitting in the car. Carbon wheels are wonderful and expensive. Beyond that the ownership picture is reassuring. Koenigsegg still supports these cars completely, holds the build record for every chassis and continues to update them, and a company whose founder is still running it has an unusual amount of institutional memory about what it sold you.