Koenigsegg Agera RS Sets New Top Speed Records

Koenigsegg knocks Bugatti off the mountaintop with incredible run on closed public roads in Nevada.

So many things impress us about the Koenigsegg Agera RS that just smashed the production car top speed record. Across runs in opposing directions, the Agera averaged 277.9 miles per hour. That bests the previous Bugatti Veyron Super Sport’s title by more than 10 mph.

And that’s maybe not even the most impressive part. Here are the incredible pieces of this historic run with some help from Automobile Magazine:

1. Astonishingly, Koenigsegg owners financed the record attempt rather than the Swedish factory. While Christian van Koenigsegg attended, Mark Stidham owns the red and carbon Agera RS that set the record. Stidham partnered with Jeffrey Chang and John Morris in putting together the runs.
2. The Agera set the record on public roads. Sure, the Nevada Highway Patrol shut down traffic on Highway 160 near Pahrump, but nobody designs normal roads for land-speed attempts. Any speed attempts can be nerve wracking, but public road runs leave a lot to chance. Sudden wind bursts or a poorly placed dip in the road can be devastating at more than 250 miles per hour.
3. Before his record attempts, driver Niklas Lilja scouted the road at ‘just’ 220 miles per hour. He then made a conservative ‘dummy’ run and still clocked more than 271 miles per hour, good for the one-way record.
4. Lilja doesn’t even push the engine hard until 190 miles per hour. When you watch the video, he eases into the throttle to that point, and then all hell breaks loose.
5. The Agera RS outran its calculated top speed. The engineers figured top speed, limited by gearing, at 282 miles per hour. The car ran 284.6 mph in its first run. Lilja ran the course the opposite direction at 271.2, hence the 277.9 mph average two ways.
6. Stidham’s Koenigsegg also broke the public road land speed record. That had been set in Nazi Germany almost 80 years ago.
7. The car also annihilated the 0-to-400 kph-to-0 record. That’s accelerating to 400 kph (248.5 mph) and back to a stop. The Agera RS did it in a jaw-dropping 33.87 seconds.

That’s a whole heap of badass from the Koenigsegg owners and Niklas Lilja. The new record also ends 12 years of Bugatti dominance in the world of top speed.

However, as Jonathan Klein from Automobile mentions, Bugatti’s Chiron features a 300 mph speedometer. Could they have something in store for the Koenigsegg? And will that crack open a new world of top-speed production cars with astronomical limits?