THE POWER OF LATERAL THINKING

CHRISTIAN VON KOENIGSEGG HAS BUILT SOME OF THE PLANET'S FASTEST MACHINES. NOW HE'S WORKING ON A RADICAL FOUR-SEAT HYBRID THAT DEFIES CONVENTIONAL HYPERCAR WISDOM.

- ANGUS MACKENZIE

Plastic bags, ballpoint pens, frozen chicken, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. That's how the screaming madness of a 1,600-hp twin-turbo flat-plane-crank V-8, the brain-melting complexity of a nine-speed transmission with seven tiny clutches, and the space/time warp of hand-built 310-mph hypercars all began. The through line? Christian von Koenigsegg, serial entrepreneur, self-taught engineer, and steadfast lateral thinker. 

Christian Erland Harald von Koenigsegg was born in Sweden on July 2,1972, and grew up near the country's capital, Stockholm, before being sent to an elite boarding school in the countryside 180 miles west of the city at the age of 14. He knew by then what he wanted to do with his life he wanted to make cars.

Today, almost 45 years after he first saw it, mention of The Pinchcliffe Grand Prix brings a smile to von Koenigsegg's face. Made in 1975, this charming Norwegian stop-motion children's film tells the story of an eccentric bicycle repairman and inventor who builds an equally eccentric car to race a Formula 1 champion who has stolen his engine design.