How To Build A 300mph Car

Welcome to the world’s slowest car factory, birthplace of the world’s fastest car

- Jack Rix

There exists a simple formula for calculating the theoretical amount of power you require to hit a certain top speed for a car with a given drag coefficient and frontal area. It’s fascinating stuff, honestly, but I shan’t put us through it here. Ten quid says John Hennessey has it tattooed on the back of his eyelids, though. Because when it comes to his ongoing, road-legal 300mph project – the Venom F5 – you get the sense he’s designed something that looks cool and slippery, then cranked up the turbo boost until his calculator says the top speed is sufficiently large. After spending a day with Christian von Koenigsegg (CvK), touring his factory in Ängelholm, Sweden and exploring the all-new Jesko hypercar (literally hours before it was packed off to the Geneva motor show), I can confirm that he has a very different approach.

“There is a version of this car which we call the Jesko 300, where we have a slightly different aero package. That car, according to our simulations, is capable of going faster than 300mph. In fact, we set everything up for at least 310mph, so there’s a little bit of buffer for error as well.” He drops this, nonchalantly, into our conversation as if it’s just another entry for the growing list of mind-bending stats that swirl around his latest project. Probably because, in his mind, it is. The Jesko is simply the culmination of everything he’s learned after 25 years in the hypercar business, a money-no-object showcase of bespoke engineering, material science and speed. The fact that a computer says it’ll crack 300mph appears to be a pleasant surprise, a nice-to-have, but all that really matters is that this is the car – “a celebration of the traditional hypercar with no electrification, a true successor to the Agera RS; visceral, direct and as lightweight as possible” – he’s always wanted to make.