Page 110 - Cool Britannia

Meanwhile, smaller specialist manufacturers whose dedication to the pursuit of something ‘truly special’ has been consistent for the last ten or so years, have maintained a course which provides the new car ‘collector’ with genuine options or, more likely, additions which bring less corporate planning and more genuine character to their delivery of extreme performance motoring. In these manufacturers, no two cars are ever quite the same. The obvious key players in this alternative division of high performance motoring are Koenigsegg and Pagani. Accounting for less than ten per cent of the total of LaFerraris produced and yet each is produced by hand with greater individual artisan craftsmanship than anything made in the factories at Woking, Stuttgart or Maranello.Koenigsegg don’t make ‘halo’ products. Each of their cars is a halo product and, with the introduction of the Agera in 2010, the company continued to provide, in very low numbers, a realistic alternative to the Bugatti Veyron to a select but growing number of enthusiastic collectors. Koenigsegg don’t limit their production numbers but are continually re-engineering their cars to produce an almost constant evolution with a handful of cars produced in each new model form. While Aston Martin presented the One-77 and Lamborghini the Reventon in strictly limited production numbers around the same time, Koenigsegg evolved the Agera into a variety of models including the One:1 which achieved the supercar holy grail of the parity of power to weight (in kgs). As a company with a keen eye on engineering progression, Koenigsegg had observed the development of the hybrid engine and launched their own hybrid, the Regera in 2015 replacing the Agera. With the increase in buyers for their highly individual and technically advanced all-carbon all hand-made cars, Koenigsegg is now able to build over 20 cars each year and is currently sold out for over three years.The ‘hypercar’ nomenclature only recently became a popular part of the automotive vernacular after three major manufacturers sequentially presented what have since become known as ‘the holy trinity’. McLaren Automotive presented the P1 at the 2012 Paris motor show, Ferrari exhibited the LaFerrari at the 2013 Geneva show and Porsche showed the 918 Spyder at the Frankfurt show in September of the same year. Offering dynamic performance which eclipsed the seminal Bugatti Veyron, the leading supercar of the time, the three new cars were mild hybrids mating high performance petrol engines with electric motors. The ‘supercar’ label had already replaced the original ‘sports car’ defnition by this point but, to describe these new levels of performance and the price that came with it, the term ‘hypercar’ was born. existing ‘halo’ product strategies. Each of these hypercars used enough new technology to create signifcant interest in the next evolution of automotive performance, even borrowing directly from the latest in Formula 1 energy recovery systems. But each also remained true to its origins and brand DNA and left further advances to be made strategically in the future.The introduction of these almost immediately iconic hypercars practically on top of each other was also no coincidence. The response of the most established and capable sports car companies to the success of Bugatti and the buoyancy of the performance car market was both as rapid as possible and corporately in line with already 110