CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG: My name is Christian von
Koenigsegg.
I'm 40 years old and for half of my life, I've been on the
quest to be a leader in the hypercar industry utilizing
Swedish design combined with visionary technical solutions.
Our latest car, the Agera R, is built in the old hangars of
a former Swedish fighter jet squadron.
Their symbol, a ghost, is now proudly painted on the back
every Koenigsegg.
[CAR ENGINE ROARING]
ROBERT SERWANSKI: My name is Robert Serwanski, and I'm a
test driver of Koenigsegg.
[CAR ENGINE ROARING]
My job is, basically, two parts.
I developed the cars and how they handle performance-wise,
and I also am a part of the production line.
Production-wise I get an assembled car, in one piece
you could say, and then I finalize it.
Finalizing means I do the wheel alignment, I put in the
brakes, put in the differential.
I'm with the guys who tune the engine properly.
Everything is assembled by hand, so there are, of course,
small differences in every car and that's why we tune every
car to a specific set up.
And we do a few wheel alignments, so everything can
settle down.
And once everything works properly, we all also check
quality of the car, of course.
Every function and every feature of the car must work.
And so nothing can rattle, nothing can sound in the car.
Yeah, and we do a lot of driving and we drive the cars
rather hard, because they need to work once
they get to the customer.
And a lot of that work is done on this runway.
[CAR ENGINE ROARING]
This is a specific car we did the zero to 300
to zero record in.
I was in 21.19 seconds.
That was a year ago.
It wasn't this cold and not this windy.
And so, of course, it was better for the
performance of the car.
And also, right now, in the videos you saw, we only run on
50% bioethanol, and in the record videos, we always drive
85%, which is available at your normal
petrol station in Sweden.
The car was just taken out on a day.
Christian gave me a call and said, shall we do test to do
the record?
And we collected some equipment, got out here, and
just did it, basically.
This was just sort of a stage in the very fine approaches of
producing the car, really.
[CAR ENGINE ROARING]
They gave me a call about two years ago and offered a job.
And I came here, had a few hours of discussion with
Christian, and we talked about what the job was about.
And then, obviously, there was a testing period, where we
went all the job through and what's supposed to be done,
and how I feel about the car.
And I'm still here.
A day could be everything from driving for 12 or 16 hours,
and it could be changing an engine or a gearbox for
development purpose.
So well, there's not one day that is the other day like,
and that's a good thing about the job, because
you never get bored.
Well, my tools are, basically, it's also depending on the
purpose obviously.
Right now, I work a lot with the gearbox.
We have our own gearbox management, and for that I
have the engineers, and I have a computer, and the car.
And also, we need to tune the gearbox for driving in the
city, or on highway, or doing zero to 300 to zero.
So if I need to tune the gearbox for driving into town,
I obviously drive into town.
And that's of course doing 50k and not 200.
[CAR ENGINE ROARING]
So everything is through one cable through OBD, is simply
accessible through one program,
one cable, one interface.
So everything, I choose what I would like to see, and what I
would like to adjust.
If I would like to go to a certain gear, for instance, I
have the behavior of a gear, the clutch, the shift time,
the torque out, everything we control.
And everything can be logged while we do it.
It's also the same thing here, even though we have thousands
of parameters, there's no purpose of really seeing it
all at once, because it would look something like this, and
it just looks messy.
I can connect that, what I see in the log, to what I sense.
And I can see that, for instance, OK, this clutch
closes a little bit too fast or we don't cut the torque
fast enough, or whatever I see or sense.
And then I change it.
And then I drive it again, try.
So it takes a really long time to adjust, because you have a
range of 1,000 to 7,000 revs.
You have seven gears.
So it's quite many cases to solve and get really good.
It's a combination between man and machine, really.
I think that we hope to do, well, we want to do the best
car in the world, basically.
And I think we're on a good way to do it.
It's a very extreme car in all ends, but you can really put
your grandma in it and just explain the pedal function, if
she doesn't have a pedal car already, and let her drive.
Because it is, really, that easy to drive.
Of course, it's wide and it's low, and all those parts, but
it's really easy to drive.
And of course, when you start pushing it, I
think you need to be--
it will not kill you, but you need to know what you're doing
to really be able to enjoy the car fully out.
Because that is when it really comes to its soul, or whatever
you like to call it.
It come alive, correct.
You can still have plenty of fun just driving along with
hitting full throttle and full break and turning, but it's a
really refined tool.
A lot of engineers, prior to my time, and during my time,
and also, what I have done with the car and all the other
people, there's a lot of effort put into it, that it
should be very perfect in its behavior.
So we actually enjoy it when people use their cars, because
that's what they are meant to do, to use them.
Yeah we don't usually do drifting or sliding for the
purpose of sliding, but that could be a byproduct of
testing something else, of course.
And when we do a lot of testing on the limit for the
car to, for instance, prevent a behavior of the car breaking
out or spinning away too easy.
And then we need to go past that point to really tell what
would happen and how the car behaves.
So we do all the adjusting and behavior.
And how we would like the car to feel is
done without anything.
And then we put ABS on, we put double train differential on,
we put the stability control on.
So we only have those as you know as your safety line,
whatever you'd like to call it, to prevent nasty things
from happening.
But if you would take everything away, we believe
that the car as it is would be very enjoyable for an
experienced driver.
Now, you can be a good racing driver and not be a good test
driver, and also the other way around.
Because the race driver is not always about feeling the car
100% or putting very good lap times.
A race driver can be at the top, because he knows how to
fight his way through the field and he has a fast, a
good pace enough to keep that first place.
But that doesn't actually mean that he needs to be the
fastest if he would go to a time attack.
So that's also the difference, that you must want to learn
what is happening.
And, of course, an input that something is understeer or
oversteer might be good enough for an engineer.
But if you can tell the engineer it understeers, but
at the same time, it's too soft, maybe we should check
the springs or the anti-roll bar.
So that's just understeer, because understeer could be,
well, a lot of things.
So I think, well, it's always about the good compromise,
really, that you need to have.
-And having fun.
ROBERT SERWANSKI: And having fun.
That's important.
You can never forget to have fun, because,
yeah, that's important.
[CAR ENGINE ROARING]