In early September, La Zambra, a five-star golf resort near Málaga, in southern Spain, hosted a jamboree for an organization called the Supercar Owners Circle. At the event, wealthy car enthusiasts—almost exclusively men—gathered to show off their vehicles, gawp at other people’s, and drive the mountainous roads of Andalusia faster than was strictly legal. The gathering, which took place over a long weekend, was by invitation only. Admission, along with room and board, cost about nine thousand dollars. “Only the most prestigious and uncompromising supercars of past and present are eligible,” the club’s Web site warned. “The final decision lies with the admission board, which consists of both S.O.C. members and external automotive specialists.”
On the Thursday evening that I arrived at La Zambra, in an Uber, the parking lot was already half full. Each car had been allotted a particular spot. I introduced myself to a thirtysomething Brit with a Midlands accent, who was walking the lot, occasionally taking photographs. He called himself Zak, but preferred not to give his surname. He’d arrived in a bright-blue McLaren 765LT Coupe, an aggressive-looking sports car with a four-litre engine for which he had paid five hundred and seventy thousand dollars. McLaren was his favorite make of car, he explained, because “everything is British”; he also loved “the sound and the vibration” he experienced when driving the coupe. Many supercar collectors rarely take their vehicles out of the garage, but Zak liked to use his for daily chores. “I go to the shops in it,” he said. “I stick it in a multistory car park. All right, I do a couple of laps before I find a spot—but I use it.”
Many of the cars in the lot were considerably more expensive and rarer than Zak’s McLaren, and he admitted that he thought himself fortunate to have been invited. I asked him if he coveted any of the other cars. He pointed out a Bugatti Chiron, with lusciously curved side panels and a cartoonishly large grille. The Chiron costs at least three million dollars, and all the cars of its limited run of five hundred have been sold. “I quite fancy a Bugatti,” Zak said.
I asked him what he did for work. He evaded the question, telling me that he travelled to the south of Spain every summer to drive various sports cars that he owns. The blue McLaren’s seats are embroidered with an Instagram handle, @zakttroy. I checked the account for biographical information. It featured photographs of cars and expensive restaurants, described Zak as an “entrepreneur,” located him in “Mayfair/Dubai/Marbella,” and listed vehicles he owned, which included another McLaren, three Lamborghinis, a Mercedes S.U.V., two Ferraris, a Porsche, two BMWs, and a Mini. I pressed him on the job question. “Mate, I don’t really work,” he said.
Zak’s summer residence was near La Zambra, so he’d driven his car directly to the event. This put him in the minority of S.O.C. delegates. Of the fifty or so cars invited to La Zambra, most were sent ahead to Málaga on trucks and disgorged near the hotel, where their owners retrieved them and then drove a few hundred yards into the resort. Outside the main gate, which was manned by two security guards, a crowd of car spotters, mostly young and male, had gathered. Some were professional journalists with heavy cameras; others were kids with iPhones. Each incoming car was quickly surrounded by photographers and forced to slow to a crawl. After a Ferrari snaked through the crowd, I asked one of the spotters which car he was most excited to see. He thought for a moment, then said that there was a purple Regera, made by the boutique Swedish car company Koenigsegg, that he longed to photograph. His answer was pleasing. The next day, for a few hours only, the purple Regera would be my ride.
Many of the cars at the S.O.C. weekend were no mere supercars; they qualified as “hypercars.” Both “supercar” and “hypercar” are slippery categories. Jason Barlow, a former host of the BBC show “Top Gear,” told me, in an e-mail, that there was no consensus on definitions, observing that “you could argue that Alfa Romeo, Bentley, Bugatti, Mercedes and others were making supercars in the nineteen-twenties,” if “supercar” meant a sports car that exceeded normal parameters. He personally felt that “year zero” for the supercar was 1966, when the Lamborghini Miura was launched. The Miura, he noted, “shifted the paradigm in two key ways—it looked incredible, and its creators moved the engine to the middle.” This location equalizes weight distribution, allowing all four wheels to maintain better traction. “From then on, any self-respecting supercar had to look beautiful or outrageous (preferably both), and it had to be mid-engined.”
In Barlow’s understanding, the first hypercar was the McLaren F1, which was launched in 1992, after four years of design and manufacture. The F1 reached a top speed of 240.1 m.p.h., then a world record for a road car. Barlow said, “It had everything. It was ultra-exclusive, had a carbon-fibre chassis and body, a race-bred V-12 engine, and was propelled into being by the vision of one individual, in this case Gordon Murray”—a British South African who had previously designed Formula 1 race cars. Only a hundred and six were made, and they are prized by collectors. The cost in 1992 was eight hundred thousand dollars. In 2021, an F1 sold for more than twenty million. Elon Musk used to own one; Jay Leno currently owns one; the Sultan of Brunei has seven.
The term “hypercar” entered the lexicon in the two-thousands, when other carmakers followed McLaren by producing absurdly powerful, and prohibitively expensive, limited-edition models. Although Porsche, Ferrari, and Aston Martin were among the established companies that entered the market, several new companies emerged that made only hypercars. Four of these specialists were named for their owners: Hennessey, in Texas; Pagani, in Italy; Rimac, in Croatia; and Koenigsegg, in Sweden. Bugatti, a dormant brand that had made some of the most powerful sports cars of the early twentieth century—including the voluptuous Bugatti Type 57 SC Atlantic, the ne plus ultra of car design—was reawakened when it was bought by Volkswagen, in 1998.
One definition of a hypercar is a vehicle that nobody needs. Most have theoretical top speeds approaching or exceeding 300 m.p.h., which is much faster than Formula 1 cars, whose top speeds are about 220 m.p.h. Many hypercars also accelerate faster than Formula 1 cars. Hypercars, though, are ostensibly manufactured for the road. (A few models are designated as track-only.) Except for Germany’s autobahn, which has no speed limit, there are few public highways where one can use more than a fraction of a hypercar’s power. To some motoring aficionados, driving a hypercar is like crushing a nut with a diamond-encrusted sledgehammer. “They are trophies, big-game hunter’s trophies,” Mikey Harvey, the editor of the car magazine The Road Rat, told me recently. “They have little or no engineering value, or aesthetic value, or, frankly, functional value. But they are rare. And they are king of the hill. And every one is a little bit faster than the last one. They’re all so completely, undrivably fast on the road. If you take any of those cars anywhere near the outer limits of their performance envelope, you should get a long custodial sentence. . . . I don’t get it. I just think it’s appealing to the very worst of us.”
In La Zambra’s parking lot, I shared Harvey’s views with Tim Burton, a blond, coltishly enthusiastic British YouTube star who broadcasts as Shmee150. Burton has done as much as anyone to promote hypercars. (His YouTube channel has received more than a billion views.) Surprisingly, Burton agreed with some of Harvey’s analysis, although he came to a different conclusion. Were hypercars laughably overengineered? “Totally!” he said. “A huge part of it is bragging rights.” But he saw a deeper design value in hypercars, and a fascinating marketplace. Hypercars, he said, represented “the ultimate in what we can create.”
Burton and I looked at three Koenigseggs on the lot, all belonging to one Swiss family. Each car’s finish had been upgraded with a proprietary super-lightweight material called Koenigsegg Naked Carbon, or K.N.C. These three cars were, I discovered, the only ones in the world finished with K.N.C. The upgrade had reduced the weight of each car by forty-four pounds. (A car’s performance is roughly determined by its horsepower-to-weight ratio.) The special finish cost four hundred thousand dollars. For that amount, you could buy a Rolls-Royce Ghost, or a typically priced house in Houston. But, perversely, the Swiss family had probably made a good investment. The price of a secondhand Koenigsegg can rise fast, and rarity is a selling point. There was, Burton said, “huge hype” around the Swedish manufacturer: “Koenigseggs right now are gold.”
The next morning, I met the owner of the purple Koenigsegg Regera, who had agreed to drive me into the mountains. He did not wish to be named in this article, but he was happy enough for me to describe him in general terms: a businessman in his forties who split his time between Singapore and Switzerland. In the heat, he wore white linen shorts, a cream-colored polo shirt, loafers, and Louis Vuitton sunglasses. He proved to be genial company, occasionally pausing from discussing his passions—which included luxury-watch design—to drag on a red vape pen. As we joined an S.O.C. convoy that was leaving the hotel, he told me about his car.
The purple Regera was one of three Koenigseggs he owned. He had bought this one, for three million dollars, in 2021. It was now worth about four million, he said. The insurance premiums on hypercars are so high that he surrenders the license plates on his Koenigseggs for most of the year. He keeps the vehicles in a secure garage maintained by a Koenigsegg dealer in Switzerland, insuring the cars only for the few days he wants to drive them. (Insurance for S.O.C. Spain 2023, he said, had cost him about two thousand dollars.) He recognized that hypercars were an expensive pastime, but he was prudent in other ways: he never took private jets, and he thought it absurd to spend millions of dollars on a yacht. “It’s a question of taste,” he said. “What you and I might consider a massive waste of money gives others pleasure.”
There were only eighty Regeras in the world, and none of them had the same purple exterior as his. He’d named the car Loki, for the shape-shifting Norse god, and he wanted the color to vary in hue depending on the light. Koenigsegg, he said, had developed a new type of iridescent purple paint just for him. The car’s interior was, per its owner’s instructions, decorated with bright-orange leather. The colorway drew admiring comments from many other S.O.C. drivers. (The purple-and-orange scheme reminded me of a dress that Scarlett wears in “Four Weddings and a Funeral”; the Regera owner couldn’t remember that part of the movie.)
The convoy entered the mountains. The Mediterranean twinkled beneath us. Most of the roads were two-lane highways, and there were few opportunities to test the Regera’s power, since regular drivers blocked the way. Occasionally, we accelerated with frightening ease past another car. On one short uphill overtake, I noticed the speedometer cross 180 kilometres per hour (112 m.p.h.); after we’d slowed down, I also noticed that I’d begun to sweat.
During an early-morning briefing at La Zambra, a Spanish race-car driver who’d been hired as an adviser for the weekend told attendees what to expect from the local traffic police. The implicit message was that an understanding had been reached. (“We have no problem—but don’t do crazy things.”) On the morning’s drive, whatever deal was in place seemed to hold: no hypercars were ticketed for speeding. At one on-ramp, I spotted a piddly Fiat Uno that had been stopped by a police car. Its owner gazed ruefully at the S.O.C. convoy roaring past.
I asked the Regera owner if he knew what the Spanish speed limit was. “No fucking idea,” he said.
Later that morning, a police vehicle appeared shortly after the Regera owner did what might be termed a crazy thing: overtaking another car on a two-lane road, with traffic coming from the other direction fast enough that I momentarily forgot to breathe. “That was easy,” he reassured me. Then he asked if I spoke Spanish, so that I could smooth-talk local officers if they pulled us over.
As the Regera whipped along, people in other vehicles hung phones out of their windows to take photographs. I suggested that this must be part of the appeal of owning such a car. “I actually don’t like the attention it gets,” the Regera owner said. “I like this car because it’s like no other. It’s a unique driving experience.” For one thing, he said, the car had no gears. Koenigsegg had developed a “direct drive” technology that obviated the need for a mechanical gearbox, and the system was first installed in the Regera. The car’s five-litre engine, along with three electric motors, resulted in instant, unyielding torque—the rotational force that translates into acceleration. When the car sped up, I felt as if I’d been suctioned to the seat by a giant vacuum cleaner. Despite having no transmission, the car had some seventeen hundred horsepower at its disposal. The litter-strewn VW S.U.V. that I drive has about ten per cent of that power.
The farther our convoy ventured from La Zambra, the bolder the cars in our group became. A baby-blue Ferrari Daytona SP3 sped around us. The car was owned, I later learned, by a Dutch real-estate magnate with conservative views on criminal sentencing.
“For some people here, it’s a dick-measuring contest,” the Regera owner said. He’d never seen the appeal of owning a Ferrari. The cars themselves were nice, he said, but he disliked the company, which forced customers to buy several lower-value Ferraris before they could even be considered for more exclusive models. Pointing at the Daytona SP3, he said, “You’d need a thirty-million-dollar purchase history to buy that car.”
We pulled into a private racetrack, which had been rented for a few hours by the S.O.C. The organizers wanted the cars to perform a leisurely parade circuit of the track, so that they could take some high-quality pictures. Instead, everybody gunned it. As the Koenigsegg accelerated, I gripped the sides of the seat. After a few fast circuits, the organizers called a halt to the fun and asked the drivers to park in rows for a photograph. The Regera pulled up next to a Porsche 918 Spyder that was decked out in the red, green, and yellow color blocking of the old VW Harlequin. The Regera owner had told me that he hated the garish scheme of the 918. Both drivers lowered their windows.
“Beautiful car!” the Porsche driver said, in a Dutch accent.
“Thank you!” the Regera owner answered, without returning the compliment.
After some small talk, the two drivers bonded over their views on the Aston Martin Valkyrie. A green Valkyrie had arrived at the track, and its owner had spent about ten minutes preparing to drive it: changing the seat position and the seat-belt configuration, and putting on a helmet. Developing the Valkyrie, I later learned, had caused grave financial distress for Aston Martin. The car had initially been designed by the two principals of Red Bull’s Formula 1 team, Christian Horner and Adrian Newey, whom Aston Martin had approached in 2015 to build a “race car for the road.” But there were innumerable design problems, and the manufacturing process was delayed by three years, leading some customers who had placed deposits to demand their money back. Several lawsuits—including a hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar claim against Aston Martin, brought by dealers who had underwritten the project—followed. In 2021, at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, in West Sussex, a Valkyrie broke down, embarrassing the company further.
Aston Martin is still building Valkyries. It plans to make a total of a hundred and fifty, along with forty specialized track versions and eighty-five convertibles. Reportedly, the car’s software remains glitchy. According to an owner, Aston Martin charges a three-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar service fee for the first three years of ownership, on top of the three-million-dollar purchase price. (Aston Martin denies this.) Nevertheless, all the cars have been sold. The Valkyrie is certainly striking: high wheel arches and a low-slung cockpit give it a leonine profile. But, the Regera owner complained, why would someone want to drive a car so loud that you were forced to wear noise-cancelling headphones, and which basically required you to strap yourself in like a fighter pilot? The Porsche owner agreed. “My friend has one, says it’s shit,” he said. “Always breaking.”
The convoy members left the racetrack, drove a short distance, then stopped for lunch. Outside the restaurant, I spotted Christian von Koenigsegg, the C.E.O. and founder of Koenigsegg, talking animatedly to a rapt group of car owners. Von Koenigsegg is tall, friendly, and as bald as a doorknob. Introducing myself, I told him that I’d loved being a passenger in the purple Regera, which was broadly truthful. (An entirely honest audit of my feelings would have noted some British middle-class embarrassment at being driven in something so flashy, and some occasional terror.) He smiled and, ignoring the car owners, began telling me about the Regera’s lack of transmission, and how he’d been inspired to design its power train after driving a Tesla in 2011, and saying to himself, “Wow! That instant power!” His next thought was “How can I make something super torquey like that?”
A few weeks later, I met von Koenigsegg at the entrance to his factory, in Ängelholm, Sweden, about an hour’s drive north of Malmö. The company operates out of several hangars on the site of a disbanded fighter-pilot unit of the Swedish Air Force. Koenigsegg uses the emblem of the old unit, a cartoon ghost, on its cars. Test-drives take place on an adjacent airfield. Near the complex’s front door, visitors are greeted by a collection of Koenigseggs: past, present, and future.
One car on display is a Gemera, the world’s first four-seater hypercar. The Gemera, a phev—plug-in-hybrid electric vehicle—with a maximum twenty-three hundred horsepower, can accelerate from zero to sixty in less than two seconds. The first models are to be delivered to customers by the end of 2024. The idea of packing one’s kids into the back of a family hypercar is amusing, and somewhat horrifying. It would certainly enliven a school commute.
At von Koenigsegg’s invitation, I stuffed my six-feet-five frame into the back of the Gemera. It was reasonably comfortable. I also noticed cup holders, which traditional sports-car manufacturers consider heretical. The Gemera has eight: four chilled, four heated. “Ferrari never had cup holders—we always had cup holders,” von Koenigsegg told me. “They think you should not drink while you’re driving a Ferrari, and I’m, like, ‘Maybe you’re thirsty?’ ”
He recounted the company’s origins. When he was growing up, Sweden’s biggest car manufacturers were Volvo and Saab. Few children have ever fantasized about owning a Volvo or a Saab. Von Koenigsegg’s bedroom was decorated with posters of Lamborghinis. As a teen-ager, he developed the ambition to make “an exciting sports car,” and this desire endured into adulthood. In 1994, at the age of twenty-two, with money he’d made trading stocks and commodities, he launched what he then called “the Koenigsegg project.”
Von Koenigsegg said, “When I got into it, I realized, I don’t have the resources to set up a big production plant. But I have the resources to hand-build things. Now, that’s a lot of hours per car, and that’s very expensive. How will I make someone pay a lot of money for one of the cars? Well, it has to be something truly special.” He manufactured hypercars, he explained, “out of necessity”: “The only path was to make the cars super exciting.”
The company sold no cars in its first eight years, although it made an impressive-looking prototype in 1996, using an Audi V-8 engine. For much of that period, the startup was based in an old thatch-roofed farmhouse, and just keeping the lights on was a struggle. The company had no income, so von Koenigsegg lived in basic accommodations near the farmhouse and took no salary, instead continuing to trade stocks to support himself and a handful of employees, including his wife, Halldora. In 1995, his father, Jesko von Koenigsegg, who had sold a small electrical company, invested most of his savings in his son’s business, and spent some time sleeping on his son’s floor. In 2003, part of the farmhouse burned down. The company moved to the abandoned airfield. Christian von Koenigsegg, who now has two sons, one of whom works for the company, told me that, without his father’s support, “we probably wouldn’t have made it.” In 2020, on his father’s eightieth birthday, Christian presented him with a Koenigsegg model named for him: the Jesko. Six hundred and fifty people now work for Koenigsegg, and its cars sell out almost the moment they’re announced.
Von Koenigsegg has benefitted from a change in the habits of owners. “When we started delivering cars, in 2002, maybe a customer had one other nice sports car,” he said. “Two or three was pretty extreme. Now forty or fifty cars isn’t unusual.” Hypercars, he noted, have become their own investment class, given that coveted models gain in value. James Banks, a hypercar dealer, told me that there was a solid wealth-management strategy behind the trend. In many countries, though not in the U.S., automobiles are considered a “wasting asset,” whatever their profitability in the secondhand market; hypercars are therefore “a very good store of wealth, because there’s generally no capital-gains tax when you sell.”
The hand-built ethos still prevails at Koenigsegg. Unlike most manufacturers, which outsource auto-body parts to other companies, Koenigsegg makes nearly everything itself, from transmissions to wheels. When I asked von Koenigsegg which parts of his cars were made by other manufacturers, he paused, then said, laughing, “The windshield wiper on the Jesko.” He also admitted that the Gemera’s brakes came from a British firm, AP Racing.
Von Koenigsegg led me around the factory. At one point, we passed a man polishing a small car part that was unidentifiable to me. Von Koenigsegg explained that it was a section of a steering wheel, and noted that, before his employees assemble a car, they spend three hundred and fifty hours polishing components. In another area of the factory, he showed me an engine that resembled a giant metallic heart. A few mechanics were tinkering with a valve. “We have the highest output-per-litre engine in the world,” von Koenigsegg said. “A five-litre engine with sixteen hundred horsepower. It’s crazy.”
It did seem crazy. (Bugatti draws similar horsepower from the Chiron’s engine, which is eight litres.) To achieve extraordinary numbers, von Koenigsegg excitedly explained, he had made hundreds of refinements to the standard design of a gasoline engine: “It’s how the intake is designed, how the injectors are positioned, how strong the block has to be, how strong the gaskets and head studs are. It’s the porting, it’s the camshaft profiles, it’s the shaping of the piston dome, it’s the combustion chamber in the cylinder head, it’s software programming, it’s ion-sensing coil-on plugs . . . ”
Von Koenigsegg continued in this vein. He enjoyed discussing his work. At several points during the tour, he stopped to give disquisitions on why his electrical inverters, or chassis-testing facilities, or over-the-air software updates were superior. These explanations were all buttressed by a raft of statistics. Listening to von Koenigsegg describe his cars was like standing beneath a waterfall. As a designer, he had a relentless curiosity and a willingness to jettison old ideas. There were no gears in the Regera; in the Jesko, there were nine. He spoke of his weighty responsibilities as a business owner and a manager, and how it ate into his time to create. His home sauna, he said, remained the best place to think.
As we surveyed a production line of cars in various stages of undress, von Koenigsegg discussed the demanding nature of his customers, who often requested bespoke details. Upholstering a car with ostrich leather was particularly expensive, he said, and not only because of the material’s cost. In order to be “homologated”—authorized for use on public roads—a new material had to be tested against seat sensors for at least two months. Von Koenigsegg said that an ostrich-leather upgrade might cost “a couple hundred thousand euros.”
“We like that people customize, in a way, because it makes the car more unique,” he went on. “And it’s kind of an industry standard. At the same time, it’s always a lot of work for us and a hassle. So we’re not unhappy if they don’t do it, because it makes our life a little more livable. So, for a customization, we put a number on paper that seems very, very high. And it is.”
Performance numbers clearly matter more to von Koenigsegg’s customers than dollar numbers. His cars have broken many records, including, this past summer, one for the fastest acceleration to 400 k.p.h.—about 250 m.p.h.—followed by deceleration back to zero. The Regera did this in 28.81 seconds. But the most prized number, he said, was a car’s top speed.
According to the Paris-based Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, a top-speed record is made by averaging the highest speed a car reaches going in two opposing directions. (The averaging neutralizes the effect of wind assistance.) In 2017, a Koenigsegg Agera RS became the world’s fastest production road car, recording a two-way speed average of 277.9 m.p.h. on a closed stretch of road near Las Vegas. It irks von Koenigsegg that, since 2019, Bugatti has claimed to have the fastest road car, after a Bugatti Chiron Super Sport hit 304.8 m.p.h. on Volkswagen’s test track in Ehra-Lessien, Germany. That Bugatti was a pre-production model rather than a retail model—and it was driven in only one direction. In October, 2020, there was also an embarrassing episode in which the American hypercar manufacturer SSC claimed that its Tuatara model had achieved a two-way average of 316.1 m.p.h. The company later admitted that the speed-recording equipment it had used was faulty. The Tuatara’s actual speed was considerably under 300 m.p.h.
“We did it according to the F.I.A. rules,” von Koenigsegg said. “According to us, the Agera is the fastest production car.” Realizing, perhaps, that he sounded combative, he added, “There are no rules—I’m just saying what my rules are. If you’re not delivering that car to customers, is it a production car? It’s more of a question than a comment.”
In any event, von Koenigsegg hoped to soon make such quibbles academic. He said that his new car, the Jesko Absolut, which is scheduled for delivery in early 2024, could break 304 m.p.h., and might even become the first road car to break 500 k.p.h., or 310 m.p.h. The Jesko Absolut was the fastest car that he’d ever made, and perhaps would ever make. New homologation rules around the world might make building an ever-faster road-legal car impossible. Plans for a world-record attempt would start once one of his forty or so Jesko Absolut customers agreed to let his new car be driven to the limit of its capabilities. Would breaking the top-speed record again make von Koenigsegg happy? “Sure, in a ‘mission accomplished’ way,” he said. “It proves the extremeness of what we’re doing.”
In the race to reach 500 k.p.h., Koenigsegg has competition, and not just from Bugatti. Next year, Hennessey, the Texan manufacturer, will attempt its own world speed record. This past July, I visited its headquarters, which are west of Houston, just off I-10. Again there were hangars. Hennessey’s production is divided between a car-and-truck-customization business, which reëngineers some seven hundred cars a year, and Hennessey Special Vehicles, which makes a small number of its own sports cars.
Inside the customization shop were Ram trucks having their vital organs engorged. Within the Special Vehicles area, there were several versions of the company’s Venom F5, a sleek and monstrously powerful car. The Venom F5 is so called because the most destructive category on the Fujita tornado scale, which measures winds up to 318 m.p.h., is F5. Only ninety-nine Venom F5s will be manufactured.
I had barely arrived before an employee used a six-point harness to strap me into the passenger seat of a deep-blue Venom F5 Coupe. The car, I was told, belonged to a “Silicon Valley person,” and had once reached 271 m.p.h. on a private track. A young driver named Alex Roys got into the car, and chatted with me as he exited the garage. (I later learned that he is Hennessey’s chief operating officer.) I could barely hear him over the engine’s growl. The English journalist Jack Rix has described getting into a Venom F5 as “exciting, but tinged with terror,” adding, “Even at idle, the engine burbles away like a T. rex puffing on a pack of B. & H.”—a brand of British cigarettes.
Roys said that he wanted me to feel “emotion.” It wouldn’t be a long journey: two laps of a small test track. We did a warmup lap in Sports Mode—or Baby Mode, as Roys called it—hitting 155 m.p.h. Then he switched to something called F5 Mode. Before the final, short straightaway, he asked me if I was ready. When he hit the accelerator, it was like being strapped to a surface-to-air missile. Each gear change provoked the car to ever more noise and aggression. We hit 170 m.p.h., then braked to make the final turn. I stifled the urge to scream, but not to curse.
John Hennessey, the company’s laconic sixty-one-year-old owner, was once in the asbestos-removal business, before his “hobby got out of control” and he started modifying cars full time. In 2007, he showed some journalists at a trade show a sketch that he’d made of a sports car; it combined a Lotus Elise chassis with a Dodge Viper V10 engine. The sketch appeared in a magazine, and two weeks later, he told me, “a guy from Dubai” ordered one. Hennessey built twelve of these vehicles, which he called the Venom GT. One reached 270 m.p.h.
He then decided to build a hypercar from scratch. The first Venom F5 was finished during the pandemic. The company has now delivered twenty-two of them. Hennessey built the F5, he told me, “as the ultimate expression of our business,” adding, “It’s pure, unapologetic horsepower.”
We discussed how Bugatti had recently declared that it was no longer interested in chasing speed records. Hennessey smiled and said that any hypercar manufacturer who made such statements wasn’t being honest. “Those European guys like to sandbag and say, ‘Well, it’s not really our top priority,’ ” he said. “And I just kind of laugh and say, ‘Yeah, right! ’ We all know each other and get along, but I love having rivalries. And I don’t like being in third or fourth place. We’re very intent on going over three hundred miles per hour in two directions, which would make the speed record official.”
To this end, Hennessey recently hired a new head of engineering, Brian Jones, from Multimatic, a Canadian firm that supplies components for other manufacturers. Jones, who worked on both the Ford GT and the Mercedes-AMG hypercars, will be responsible for what is known within Hennessey as the “V-Max attempt.” I spoke to Jones by video call, and he told me what would be required to break the record: extreme horsepower, courtesy of the F5’s giant engine, and low drag.
All designers of fast vehicles obsess about drag—the aerodynamic effects of airflow over a vehicle. A hypercar designer had to shift his thinking, von Koenigsegg said, from “traditional aerodynamics to aerospace aerodynamics.” Frank Heyl, the German designer of the Chiron Super Sport, told me that when he was first asked to create a Bugatti that could exceed 300 m.p.h., in 2018, he immediately identified the most difficult problem to solve: “A x Cd,” or the frontal area of the car multiplied by drag. Heyl said, “The laminar airflow—the air that attaches to the body of the car—has to tear off in the rear somewhere.” A bigger tear-off area created poorer aerodynamics. Heyl’s solution for what became the Super Sport was a long tail. In his first sketches, he drew a car with an elegant rear. The finished car not only has a longer tail than earlier Bugatti hypercars; its exhausts are stacked on top of one another, allowing for a longer underbody diffuser and a tiny tear-off area.
Both Hennessey and Jones, though, believed that important aspects of breaking the speed record for a road-legal car had nothing to do with the vehicle itself. Choosing the right course was paramount. You needed a straight section long enough to let you accelerate to 300 m.p.h. and then decelerate before crashing into a corner. A car driving 300 m.p.h. covers a mile within twelve seconds. The VW test ring, where Bugatti had reached 304.8 m.p.h., was the obvious place to make the V-Max attempt: it has a straightaway 5.4 miles long. But there was no way that a rival would let Hennessey borrow its track. John Hennessey had discussed using a closed stretch of public highway in Texas, but driving at such a speed on a public road was fraught with safety risks. Jones’s top prospect is the Johnny Bohmer Proving Grounds, at the Kennedy Space Center, in Florida, which has a three-mile straightaway. The car had already been tested there, at lower speeds. “It’s a very good facility,” Jones said. “It’s very smooth. You have an acceleration road onto the facility. With the right drag—yeah, it’s possible.”
Many discussions about breaking the top-speed record ignore the human factor. Driving at 300 m.p.h. is a fearsome prospect. Most things travelling that fast are flying. A fully laden Boeing 747 takes off at about 185 m.p.h. For a car to safely conduct a top-speed attempt, it and the road must be in virtually perfect condition. Burst a rear tire and the front of the car will lift; lift the front and the car becomes a plane. It takes a certain kind of person to keep his foot pressed to the floor.
Andy Wallace, a soft-spoken former race-car driver in his sixties, who is now one of Bugatti’s so-called test pilots, may understand high-speed driving better than anybody else. He drove the McLaren F1 that hit 240.1 m.p.h. in 1998, breaking the world record at the time; he also drove the Bugatti model in the top-speed run in 2019.
“Nothing quite prepares you for three hundred,” Wallace told me recently. “It’s funny—as a racing driver, your brain is used to doing two hundred, two-ten. If you add another ten per cent on that, you’re in a place where you’re not familiar. . . . It’s all whizzing by. You keep doing that up to over three hundred. You’re looking around and thinking, Gee, this is really fast!”
Bugatti tested the Chiron Super Sport multiple times, in wind tunnels and at Ehra-Lessien, before making the top-speed attempt. In the days before the 2019 run, Wallace drove several times at about 280 m.p.h. while engineers measured the downforce on various parts of the car—insuring, in his words, that “it would stick to the road.”
Wallace explained that, at very high speeds, things had happened to the Bugatti that he did not anticipate. At about 280 m.p.h., the gyroscopic effect of the wheels turning so fast overcame the front-suspension geometry, which keeps the car straight. In other words, once the car began turning in one direction it kept turning. He likened the effect to a spinning top. At high speeds, these tiny changes made him feel as if the wheels were “off all over the place.” Sometimes a crosswind buffeted the car, and he had to make adjustments to avoid hitting the track barriers.
Bugatti’s engineers attended to the steering issues. The track was scoured for pebbles. Bugatti estimated that, at 300 m.p.h., each tire was being subjected to a seven-ton tearing force. The test car’s tires were checked and double-checked by an X-ray machine. Once Wallace and the engineers felt that they’d dealt with every issue, they made the attempt. “Things can still go wrong,” he said. “But if you never took a risk you’d never cross the road.”
The top-speed run took place on a cloudy Friday morning. Wallace came out of a banked turn onto the long straightaway, at about 160 m.p.h., and “pinned it.” He was travelling at 278 m.p.h. when a small join in the track caused the Bugatti to momentarily jump. When it landed, it “didn’t swerve as much as I was expecting,” Wallace recalled. “I thought, Great!” Acceleration past 280 m.p.h. was relatively slow, because of the volume of air that the car had to push out of the way. Wallace was committed to keeping his foot slammed on the accelerator, but he was consuming the straightaway alarmingly fast.
“The other end’s coming now, and you can see it coming,” he recalled, lost in the story. He needed to decelerate to 135 m.p.h. to avoid crashing at the next turn. He had planned to release the accelerator when passing a raised gantry at the side of the track, but that marker was predicated on earlier runs, when he’d driven more slowly. It would take him longer to slow down if he was actually breaking 300 m.p.h.
He hit 304.7724 m.p.h.
“It seemed a shame to lift off the accelerator, but then you see the wall coming,” Wallace said. He couldn’t apply the brakes—the force going through the car was too great—but he felt that he was decelerating sufficiently to make the turn. With the bend very close, however, he saw the speedometer showing 225 m.p.h. Wallace told himself, “Shit, this is not good,” before “humping on the brakes.” He held the car on the road through the turn, just barely, and a few minutes later he returned to a hero’s welcome by the pits.
I found myself fantasizing about driving such a fast car. On a pristine fall morning in late September, I travelled to Bugatti’s factory and headquarters, in Molsheim, in the Alsace region of France. Shortly after arriving, I signed a waiver releasing Bugatti from liability should I suffer injury or death. A Bugatti Chiron Super Sport—a version of the company’s quickest model, limited to 273 m.p.h.—was parked outside. I was told that, later that morning, Pierre-Henri Raphanel, a former winner at Le Mans, would take me for a spin. But I didn’t know whether I’d get a chance to drive the car myself.
Raphanel, an energetic Frenchman in his sixties, has an encyclopedic knowledge of automobiles, and of Bugatti history. Inside a museum at the company’s headquarters, he showed me a curved writing desk made in 1902 by Carlo Bugatti, the father of the company’s founder, Ettore Bugatti. The design was dominated by a single sweeping curve of polished walnut, like a breaking wave. The influence of Carlo on his son’s car designs, and even on the Chiron, was plain.
Raphanel rarely stopped talking on our drive, but when he did I was struck by how quiet the interior was, especially compared with the Venom F5. Raphanel said that the Chiron was a luxury car first and a sports car second. “Normally, a sports car is noisy outside and inside,” he noted. “A luxury car is quiet inside.” He opened the windows to show how much noise the car kept out; it was like opening the door to an industrial furnace. The windows were double-glazed. “That’s crazy on a supercar,” he said. “That’s what you find on a Rolls-Royce.”
On some thinly populated stretches of road, Raphanel showed me a little of what the Bugatti could do. He said that he was going to take the engine to two thousand revolutions per minute, in third gear. (The car has seven.) He would then accelerate. He told me to “hold my body,” because he’d have to brake after accumulating so much speed. I braced, but was still unprepared for the sensation that followed. Raphanel accelerated so quickly that I strained my calf muscle pushing on a phantom brake. He then decelerated to a dawdle, seemingly within a few feet. After we’d slowed down, I began giggling. “Yes,” Raphanel said. “It’s ridiculous! ” When he showed me how the car cornered at high speeds, on an empty two-lane road, I noticed that the speedometer hit 235 k.p.h., or 146 m.p.h.
We pulled into a parking lot, and Raphanel offered to switch seats. He explained the paddle gears and the shift system to me, and I took off. A Bugatti Chiron Super Sport is more than six and a half feet wide. (The average car is 5.8 feet wide.) I inched out of the lot, anxious not to scrape the car on a curb, and unclear what the insurance situation was. I regretted not having scrutinized the waiver, and hoped that Bugatti had made judicious provisions.
Even at less than thirty miles per hour, I felt other drivers on the road eying me warily. Raphanel explained that everything he was going to ask me to do would be safe. It might not, however, be legal. It was possible to break the French speed limit in the Super Sport’s first gear, and he wanted me to see more of the car’s potential. He reassured me that he always did this with potential customers. The local police, he implied, had a gentleman’s agreement regarding Bugatti test-drives; Raphanel and the other drivers tried to use only quiet roads.
We approached a stretch of freeway with just a few cars. Raphanel had told me, “When I tell you ‘full power,’ it’s not ‘kissing the throttle.’ . . . It’s how the Americans say ‘Pedal to the metal.’ ” But when he said, “Full power,” I couldn’t commit. My right foot depressed the accelerator halfway, perhaps a little more. I’d inspected the Super Sport’s engine in the Bugatti factory. It weighed nine hundred pounds and looked as big as a Shetland pony. It seemed insane to provoke such a beast.
Raphanel reminded me to trust him. The next time, when he said, “Full power”—adding, “Full, full, full!”—I did as told. Other cars flew past the passenger window like blown leaves. My focus narrowed on the lane before me. The speedometer showed an alarmingly high number before Raphanel told me to brake. Evidently, I didn’t brake hard enough: he physically depressed my leg. As we decelerated, the car never veered from a straight line.
Afterward, my emotions were conflicted. I got an undeniable rush from the experience. But the speed, and its obverse, came almost too easily. The car was certainly a feat of engineering, but driving it felt eerily like playing a video game. The Bugatti created the dangerous illusion that there was little actual jeopardy in driving so fast. In the hours after the test-drive, my elation was laced with a vinegary shame about having floored the accelerator on a public road.
Who would buy such a car? Bugatti protects its customers’ identities, but a spokesperson was keen to tell me that a few women had bought Chirons. Social media revealed some famous owners: Cristiano Ronaldo, the soccer player; Andrew Tate, the indicted influencer; Sheikh Mohammed Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai. During a presentation at Bugatti’s headquarters, the head of the company’s sur mesure program shared his laptop’s screen on a projector, and I noticed that a Chiron Super Sport 300 onscreen had been modified for a customer called Al Thani—the name of the family that rules Qatar. I later discovered the exact model. One of the Thanis had created, in collaboration with Hermès, a Bugatti Chiron Super Sport 300 with a white exterior and a white-and-red interior. (The collaboration was described as a “one of one” edition.) I saw a YouTube video that showed the car being driven in London this past summer. It crawled through traffic in Knightsbridge, at one point waiting behind a garbage truck.
It hasn’t escaped hypercar manufacturers’ notice that the planet is warming, or that various governments have indicated their desire to phase out new internal-combustion engines within the next decade or two. The manufacturers hope to be exempted from such rules, since each vehicle is produced in very small numbers and is driven so seldom that the sector’s over-all environmental impact is tiny.
Paul Horrell, a journalist who is a juror for the European Car of the Year award, which is issued by a consortium of automobile publications, told me that there were other ways to assess hypercars’ environmental impact. On the one hand, the cars were inevitably part of a life style of conspicuous consumption that included vast properties, frequent travel on private jets, and other indulgences that contribute to climate change. On the other hand, he said, “when you develop a vehicle for performance you are, at the same time, developing for efficiency, because what you’re trying to do is increase the amount of power that you can get for a given amount of fuel.” By designing these vehicles, Horrell said, “you’ve effectively found ways of reducing energy consumption, and you’ve found ways of reducing weight, because you have to use these new strong materials.” Such innovations “will, with luck, transfer to more ordinary vehicles.”
Koenigsegg’s pioneering use of an engine with no camshaft in the Gemera was one example. Car designers have long dreamed of a “camless engine”—lighter, more efficient, less emissive. The Gemera’s standard engine is nicknamed the Tiny Friendly Giant. Von Koenigsegg hopes that other car manufacturers will adopt the technology, and he has already received an order from a diesel-truck manufacturer.
By contrast, John Hennessey, who once flirted with making a purely electric hypercar, wants his cars “to be the exclamation point on the end of the internal-combustion era.” He drives a Tesla to work, but told me that his company’s next car will contain a giant gasoline engine.
The future, of course, will be fully electric. Nobody makes better electric hypercars than Mate Rimac, a thirty-five-year-old Croatian with a thick, dark beard and a boyish manner. At school, he won several national and international prizes for electronics. He also began racing cars. In 2007, when he was nineteen, he accidentally blew up the engine of a 1984 BMW. Instead of replacing the engine with another internal-combustion model, which was too expensive for him, he built an electric power train. The converted BMW went 174 m.p.h. and accelerated from zero to 100 k.p.h. (62 m.p.h.) in 3.3 seconds, which was faster than any E.V. had previously gone. As with John Hennessey, a hobby became a business.
Rimac told me, “Initially, I wanted to prove that electric cars can be fun, exciting, and cool. I thought the business would be converting combustion-engine cars to electric—a pretty bad idea, technically and financially. So then I wanted to build my own car.”
At the time, there were no high-performance electric vehicles on the market. In 2011, at the age of twenty-three, Rimac presented his Concept One car at the Frankfurt Motor Show. It was an elegant two-door coupe with a top speed of 221 m.p.h., and it could go from a stop to 62 m.p.h. in 2.4 seconds. The Concept One was easily the fastest electric car in the world. Eight were made. Each cost about a million dollars. Rimac still loves internal-combustion cars: he owns ten, including a Porsche Carrera GT. (Porsche has a twenty-per-cent stake in the Rimac Group.) But, he told me, he wanted to prove that an electric hypercar could, in many ways, “actually be better” than internal-combustion models. In the eyes of the car trade, he has succeeded.
The Concept One allowed Rimac to develop two sides of his business. He sold his batteries and electric power trains to other carmakers; meanwhile, he raised money to create another hypercar, which became the Rimac Nevera. It launched in August, 2021. That November, the Rimac Group took control of Bugatti. The joint venture, known as Bugatti Rimac, now has one design team, and the business operates out of Croatia, France, and Germany. The next Bugatti model, Rimac said, will be a hybrid, but it will retain a “very emotional combustion engine.”
In November, I visited the Rimac Group headquarters, outside Zagreb. In the wiring department, engineers were painstakingly positioning some of the sixteen miles of wiring that goes into each Nevera. The wiring process takes two weeks per car. One of the Neveras on the assembly line was being built for Mate Rimac himself. Its exterior was bright red. “M8” and “K8” were stitched into the seats where he and his wife, Katerina, would sit.
Later, I visited a new factory that the Rimac Group is building, a few miles from the current headquarters. At seventy-five thousand square metres, the factory is roughly the same size as Dubrovnik’s Old Town. For now, it is empty, except for heavy machinery. When it opens, next year, the company will devote about a third of the space to making hypercars, and the remaining two-thirds to making components for other companies. Rimac declined to name all his clients, but some are publicly known: Porsche, Hyundai, Aston Martin, seat, Jaguar.
Mate Rimac had thought deeply about the future of automobiles. Hypercars, he said, were valuable precisely because they were unnecessary. “Do you need art?” he said. “Or music? Hypercars are like the culmination of all human disciplines, like art, design, science. . . . For me, it’s a celebration of human ingenuity in its most beautiful form.”
Rimac hopes that, no matter what changes in legislation occur in the coming years, enthusiasts like him will still be allowed to drive internal-combustion-engine cars for enjoyment. But he also thinks that, in not much more than a decade, most people won’t own a car—a view seemingly at odds with his business model. “It’s a very controversial topic,” he said. “It’s kind of like saying people will not eat meat in ten years.” Soon, he predicted, convenient alternatives to car ownership will exist: shared cars, driverless cars. Rimac is the founder of a European robo-taxi startup. When such options exist, and have been made truly affordable through economies of scale, “who will go through the pain of having a car?”
He continued, “My parents still had horses. And it’s not like you cannot have a horse today. It’s just a question of allocating the time and energy and money—do you really want to buy a horse? It will be the same with cars. Look rationally at it. It’s the second-biggest expense in your life, after your house. And you have to worry about it—where you park it, when you service it. So I think most people will choose not to own a car.” (Rimac and Christian von Koenigsegg recently took part in a discussion about this issue on “Top Gear,” and von Koenigsegg said, “Human beings are not rational. People like to own things.”)
Before leaving Croatia, I drove the Nevera on a private track near the airport. It had rained overnight, and the tarmac was slippery. Rimac’s chief test-driver, Miro Zrnčević, showed off some of the Nevera’s qualities. It accelerates faster than any road car ever made: zero to 60 m.p.h. in 1.74 seconds, and zero to a hundred in 3.21 seconds. By now, I was used to the power of hypercars, but it was my first time experiencing such power so noiselessly. When Zrnčević accelerated from a standing start, my brain struggled to align the speed we accumulated with the near-silence around us. I nearly threw up.
Gordon Murray, the designer of the McLaren F1, has said that “an electric car can’t give you all the emotional stuff.” When it was my turn to drive the Nevera, I may not have felt deep emotion, but I did experience fun. There was a playfulness to the design. Each wheel on the Nevera is powered by its own electric motor. If you switch the car to Drift Mode, the front motors disconnect, causing you to skid around corners, often in a haze of tire smoke. Once, at Zrnčević’s suggestion, I hit Drift Mode and did doughnuts in the center of the private track, pointlessly. In Track Mode, where the steering is designed to be more precise, I accidentally hit a puddle and spun out of control, braking just before a grassy runoff area. “Nice reactions,” Zrnčević said.
With only ninety minutes until my flight home, Zrnčević suggested that I drive the Nevera to the airport. If I’d been driving a Lamborghini or a Bugatti, the engine would have been roaring at low speeds, causing a stir at the departures terminal. The noiseless Rimac barely drew a glance. I wondered how many people who had paid two million dollars for a hypercar would have been content with being so ignored. Happily, I would never have to wrestle with that conundrum. I parked illegally, in a taxi stand outside the terminal, and ran for my plane. ♦
