SWEDE EMOTION

The making of the legend of Koenigsegg, Sweden’s record-breaking ‘‘megacar’’ marque

- NICOLA S STECHER

The Koenigsegg story begins, in its purest form, in the rolling hills of a mythical town called Pinchcliffe. At the Pinchcliffe Grand Prix, to be exact—Ivo Caprino’s 1975 stop motion film featuring a bicycle repairman named Theodore Rimspoke and his animal cohorts. In the film, notably the most popular in Norwegian history, Rimspoke conspires to build the

fastest car ever made and win his hometown’s GP against a traitorous ex-assistant. When an impressionable Christian von Koenigsegg first watched it wide-eyed as a child, Rimspoke’s ambition resonated so deeply he turned to his father as they leftthe cinema and declared that, one day, he too would build the fastest car in the land.

“That’s what I’m going to do when I grow up, I told my father,” Christian recalls of that distant afternoon. “I’m going to be that bicycle repairman.”

All kids dream, of course. But Rimspoke, described as “an independent sort of fellow, more of an inventor than a businessman,” parallels Christian in ways too uncanny to ignore. While the fictional Scandinavian craftsman made his name inventing a dualengined, copper-bodied hotrod dubbed Il Tempo Gigante (with spinning onboard radar, naturally), this thoughtful, determined Scandinavian has also made his name inventing machines of absurd provenance.