Sometimes rich people really dig into an engineering project only to complete it, lift their head and somberly wonder to themselves, “what was the point of all this?” When that happens, they create arbitrary records for their projects to attempt to beat, which Koenigsegg claims it has done by launching a Koenigsegg Regera from 0 to 400 km/h (248.5 mph)and back to 0 in a claimed record time.
Here’s the video of the Regera’s alleged record attempt, but it’s cut to shit so who knows how many takes the company did:
Considering they somehow managed to get car-to-car footage of the record-setting car at the moment the video suggests it hits 400 kmh, or 249 mph, I highly doubt they had a second car going that speed, though who knows, this is Koenigsegg, it has the cars to do it. In any case, I wouldn’t be surprised if we were actually watching some sort of dramatic recreation of the actual speed and stop run.
With that in mind, Koenigsegg claims it set a time of 31.49 seconds over a distance of 1.27 miles, beating its own record of accelerating from 0 to 249 mph and then braking back to 0 which it set with a Regera RS in 2017 with a time of 36.44 seconds in a customer car. That beat the previous record holder’s time, the Bugatti Chiron, of 41.96 seconds which was also set in 2017.
Koenigsegg claims it did the run again switching units from the metric 400 kilometers per hour to a clean and even 250 miles per hour, setting a time of 32.48 seconds.
On the metric run, it took the car 22.87 seconds to get up to 400 kmh, but just 8.62 seconds to come to a full stop from that speed. That means you can scrub a speed of 249 mph in almost exactly a third of the time it takes to accelerate up to 249 mph.
While the record itself is mostly kind of arbitrary, it is a great display of the hybrid Regera’s technology, which features three electric motors paired with a twin-turbo 5.0-liter V8, making a combined 1,479 HP and 1,465 lb-ft of torque and managing all of that power through a single gear with a 2.73:1 final drive.
As if one arbitrary millionaire’s record wasn’t enough, the video ends with factory driver Sonny Persson telling Mr. Koenigsegg to hold his beer, suggesting he’s about to go make a record speed attempt possibly to beat Bugatti’s recently-set 304 mph speed run—which Koenigsegg argues isn’t completely legit anyway.
The airfields are our coliseums and the rich European car boys our gladiators.