Tuesday 19th July 2016
Koenigsegg One:1 wrecked at the 'ring
Nordschleife glory will have to wait - there's some more panel beating required first
With all the raising of the bar with 'ring records in the last few years you could be fooled into thinking it's easy. If your car's not quick enough just increase power/tyre stickiness/driver gonad size and reap the sub-seven glory.
Safety measures proved their worth
Koenigsegg's relationship with the 'ring proves otherwise. And whether political or practical its attempts to set a lap with its One:1 'megacar' haven't always ended with the hoped for result. First there was the unfortunate timing of going for an all-out record just as the 'ring was reeling from Jann Mardenborough's
deadly crash and management banned manufacturers from
going for lap times, this rather blowing apart the central conceit of the movie intending to
record the attempt for posterity. Since then there has been another crash and a conspicuous lack of the kind of headline grabbing lap time you'd expect of a brand like Koenigsegg.
Now, supercar crash stories aren't really our thing here on PH. But everything Koenigsegg does is spectacular. And that goes for crashing too. No embarrassing slither into the Armco for the One:1 here. Rather a prolonged lock-up out of the terrifyingly fast dip at Fuchsrohre, a leap OVER the crash barriers at Adenauer Forst and a humiliating and prolonged recovery onto an open-bed recovery truck before completing the lap of shame many a 'ring visitor has endured.
Adenauer Forst all too familiar crash site
Crucially our spy snappers report the driver is OK, deflated airbags and an intact driver safety cell seemingly doing their job in what looks to have been a pretty high-speed shunt. No point speculating on the cause of the crash here; if you're pushing for a time these things can happen to the best. And Fuchsrohre is sphincter-tighteningly fast in any car, let alone a 1,000hp-plus megacar. Let's just say the transition from one of the fastest parts of the track into one of the slowest has caught out many, at least two of us on the PH team (among many, many others) having had moments here we'd rather forget... Nice to know we're in good company though.
Koenigsegg isn't a brand to give up easily though. And proving the One:1 is capable of more than just generating very big straight line/bottom line numbers is an essential demonstration of brand credibility. That lap time, when it does come, will be all the sweeter for the sacrifice it demanded...
[Photos: S. Baldauf/SB-Medien]
