Bug catcher: Koenigsegg Agera

News of the Veyron’s world speed record reached Christian von Koenigsegg quickly, mainly because I told him about it two days after it had happened – when it was still a closely guarded secret, in fact. As our TopGear magazine crew walked around the Koenigsegg factory, enjoying a guided tour from the boss himself, I casually dropped it into the conversation. “Hey Christian, by the way...”

And so one of the first people to find out about the Veyron’s record was a man who was in a position to beat it. He wanted to know how fast it had gone, that was the first question, as you’d expect. When we told him ‘415’ he said, “I thought they would go faster than that.” (As it happened, Bugatti’s testers did go faster, up to 431kph, so he was right). He then began to ponder high-speed location options out loud...

Words: Bill Thomas
Photos: Joe Windsor William

“They have a good test track, Volkswagen – but they wouldn’ let us use it, of course,” said Koenigsegg. “Maybe they would before there was such a thing as a Bugatti Veyron. But not now.”

As James May has just shown us, running a road car to that sort of terminal velocity requires a good deal of well-surfaced, straight road and preferably a high-speed corner leading onto that straight road. There aren’t many places on the planet that fit that description and Christian von Koenigsegg is painfully aware of it.

No matter. We’ve come here to Angelholm in Sweden to drive his new car, the Agera. We won’t be breaking any speed records, but be in no doubt this machine in its full state of tune would have a fair shot at beating the new Veyron. It has a more slippery shape than the previous 245mph CCX, and 104bhp extra power, taking it up to 910bhp.

The engine is all-new, twin-turbocharged now rather than twin-supercharged. Koenigsegg is chasing ultimate power and turbos are the way to go (the fact that the Veyron has four is a clue). The car we’re driving is an early development machine and uses a 4.7-litre V8 with twin fixed-vane turbos. The production car will use a slightly gruntier 5.0-litre engine with variable-geometry vanes on the turbos for greater flexibility of boost. It will also be fitted with a new seven-speed gearbox: because we’re in it so early, we’re restricted to the old six-speeder.

The suspension design is new, too, with different length wishbones and new dampers, front and rear. There’s always room for improvement, even with a car as accomplished as the previous CCX. Loris Bicocchi, of TopGear fame – see issue 198 – helped design and develop the new set-up, and he’s a grand master. The brakes are bigger, with carbon ceramic discs, of course, of 392mm and 380mm diameter.

We gaze at the evil dark-grey test car that will soon be ours for the day, and it looks fantastic – familiar, yet strikingly new. The front end is wider, the ram air inlets beneath the new lights redesigned, and the changes continue down the sides with new skirts, leading to a new rear end with LED lights, reprofiled bodywork and the mother of all rear diffusers, far bigger than the outgoing model’s. The overall shape is still obviously Koenigsegg, with its cab-forward stance, letterbox-style windscreen and long side glass, but it’s more modern, more aggressive. It is also a more efficient shape, creating about 30 per cent more downforce front and rear, which equates to 300kg at 250kph.

“There will be cars coming out in this category soon, like the new Ferrari Enzo,” says Koenigsegg, “and we need to be ready for them.”

The cockpit sees equally thorough revision. The instruments directly in front of you are now full LED screens, with a combined rev counter and speedo in the centre, and ancillary gauges and graphs for oil pressure, water and oil temperature, fuel pressure and turbo boost clustered around it. It’s all crystal clear and beautifully designed. The centre console is also new, with elegant backlit switches beneath a main hi-res touchscreen. Here you can adjust functions like nav and audio, as well as car settings like gearshift and traction control. You can even adjust the wing mirrors from the screen. The whole effect is one of supreme high tech, absolutely cutting edge. Aston Martin, take note for your One-77.

Enough of the fitments. Time to drive. I’ve decided to split this day into two parts – some mucking around in a straight line (with some slides and burnouts) on the Koenigsegg test runway, part of an old Saab Viggen fighter base, then a full-attack blast down a narrow B-road through a forest later in the evening, with the two locations linked by a fast A-road.

Let’s get in. Touch a small rubber button beneath the door sill and the window scrolls down an inch and the door pops open a crack. Lift gently and it swings up and forward effortlessly in a clean, smooth arc. The coolest door mechanism of any car in the world? You’ll get no argument from me – SLS schmesselless. Lower yourself awkwardly over the super-wide sill with ‘Agera’ carved across its alloy plating, then drop down low into the cossetting racing bucket. Like all cars with great driving positions, the wheel telescopes out a long way so you can get it right to your chest. Sit for a moment, look forward through the distant slot of a windscreen. The view is fantastic, like sitting in a Le Mans prototype.

Foot off the brake, touch the large starter button in the middle of the console. The electrics come to life, the screens blinking awake, a whirr priming the fuel. Foot on brake now and touch the starter button again and holy sh-

This is a car which, when fired up, blots everything else out in your mind. It is so loud that it obliterates thought – you are momentarily shocked, devoid of emotion other than mild fright. Even the starter motor is deafening, and all that thing’s doing is firing up a much bigger and shoutier motor residing about five inches from the back of your neck. It doesn’t start, it explodes, this thing. You furrow your brow slightly at the blast – this is a fiendishly loud car to be in, with no nod whatever to sound deadening or refinement. I absolutely love it. You’re here to drive a supercar, not to waft.

The big V8 idles with a deep clattering thrash, all functional machine noise, accompanied by a whine of turbochargers like a distant police car siren. Rev it and you know instantly this is a near-race engine, the light flywheel effect the most vivid indicator. The raw sound reverberates around the cabin in a blast as thick as ocean surf.

Engage the first of the gears in the sequential robotised manual with a firm pull of the right paddle. CLACK, the gear hits home and a ‘1’ replaces the ‘N’ on the centre dial. If it’s loud at tickover, what the hell will it be like at 7,000rpm? We’ll soon know. A bit of throttle and the auto clutch engages with a single positive thrust. Whump. We’re away. The car is already warm because Christian has brought it to the track for us. I remember another feature of this early car – no traction control – before burying my right foot hard down in second gear.

According to Koenigsegg, 62mph comes up in 3.1secs and 124mph (200kph) in 8.9secs. A few seconds more and we’ve hit 200mph, at which point the Agera is accelerating as hard as most hot hatches do in second: 250mph would be a giggle. Big brakes now please, to avoid plowing through the fence at the end of the runway, and once I’ve recovered from all the G-forces and the fury, I’m thinking about Sweden. Just Sweden, because everything else has been wiped out of my cerebral cortex. I’m thinking about the beauty and simplicity of Swedish design, about Swedishness in general and about the fury of this car as a stark contrast to every cliché you’ve ever encountered about the passive, green country it was born in. We have just rocketed up this Viggen base as fast as any car on earth could manage, and we’ve done it in a car from Sweden.

Reserved? No. And that’s what makes the Agera the most exciting supercar on earth, bar none, for me. I’d felt it compress itself onto the runway as the speed zapped past 100mph, felt the steering become even more positive and stable. With the optional ‘handling’ full-downforce wings fitted, this car develops so much downforce that it destroys its tyres, so it has to be speed restricted in that configuration. It is a wonderful, frighteningly fast machine and one not to be treated lightly.

Back the other way – I do the run six or eight times, getting used to the power, then start doing some circle work. The big Michelins break away with easy progression when the boost kicks in, then you can modulate the drift angle at will, the throttle pedal perfectly sharp and accurate, the steering weighty and quick, with plenty of feel, the electronic diff modulating torque brilliantly. I don’t have the skill or the nerve to try this sort of smoking action on the road, and I spin a few times even here, but it’s obvious that the car is a big pussycat and that the chassis, with a fiendishly expensive carbon-fibre tub at its core, copes with the power. You just have to remember that those wide tyres at the back give up on the job of harnessing the engine’s torque very, very easily, without much of a fight, in any of the first three gears.

On our B-road, north-east of Angelholm around Lake Vastersjon and Rossjon, the factor I have most clearly in my mind is the lack of traction control: 910bhp + Bill Thomas + challenging unknown B-road in the Swedish woods = recipe for visit to trees.

But the nerves soon disappear. Within minutes I’m threading the thing along this forest road at a decent speed, forgetting its near-two-metre width. It rides beautifully, almost softly, breathing deeply over harsh bumps and longer undulations, and combining that with body control and cornering agility from the very top drawer. Yes, it’s still frightening in this narrow tunnel of trees if you let it rev right out, but at half throttle it is as delicate and engaging as a Lotus Exige. I couldn’t give it higher praise.

In the past year I’ve been lucky enough to drive the Lamborghini Murciélago LP640, the Ferrari 458 and GTO and Scud, the Gallardo and SLS. But none of them comes close to this Agera for sheer excitement and drama. For me, then, this one beats them all, because supercars – damn it, hypercars – should be all about excitement. Agera means ‘to act’ in Swedish. Perfect name, too.