The Koenigsegg Nürburgring Ban Debunked

Koenigsegg are in a league of their own when it comes to high performance, yet road legal cars. Ever since Christian assembled his team of evil geniuses to develop the first Koenigsegg, the automotive world has viewed performance, and how much you can spend on a car, very differently. The CC8S won the Guiness world record at the time for the most powerful engine in a series produced car, at 655hp. Granted, just 6 were made, but it still counted nonetheless. The track focussed follow up, the CCR, finally managed to best the Mclaren F1's top speed after 8 years. With achievements like this mere years after their founding in 1994, its unsurprising that the company have cemented their place in automotive history. In just over 20 years since the CC8s' public release, Koenigsegg have blown everyone's expectations out of the water. Despite their relatively small team, they keep innovating at a rate which is normally reserved for companies with much larger teams and budgets. In may of 2015, Koenigsegg are gearing themselves up to go for a record around the ring, in the one:1. This was going to be a part of a hypercar documentary, which had been filmed for the previous 3 years. Koenigsegg and the film's production team are organising their travel over to the Nordschliefe, and are eagerly anticipating going for the record. They think they've got a good chance of taking it. Then, disaster strikes. They've been banned from attempting a record. Officials were concerned the car would be too fast and dangerous, so they put a stop to it. Supposedly, the Germans didn't want to glory of the Mercedes amg one, a German car, to be taken away by a superior Swedish car. Or at least that's according to the internet. There's no truth to this at all, but it's a common myth that's been going round for years at this point. Here's what really happened. Earlier in 2015, a decked out GTR Nismo driven by Jann Mardenborough was taking part in the first race of the season. The 23 year old from Cardiff was binning it, when he approached the "quiddenbacher hohe" which is a blind hill with a corner almost immediately after. Now it's common for cars to get a bit of airtime here, but the GTR's jump was considerably more dramatic. In a manner very reminiscent of a Merc CLR, his car lifted off completely, flipping towards a nearby spectator area. The car landed on its roof, and tragically killed a spectator and injured two others. The DMSB, who act as an authority in German Motorsport, knew something had to be done to protect drivers and spectators. A strict speed limit of 200km/h was added between hochheichen and schwedenkreuz, and 250 on the dottinger straight. Since then, the limits have been lifted though, with better fencing and a road resurfacing taking their place. They also repositioned some of the spectator stands, especially around riskier bends. And, that's it really. Koenigsegg were "banned" from getting a lap record for less than a year, and even that's a real stretch. It was still theoretically possible to get a new record, and it wasn't just Koenigsegg, it was all cars. Sadly, it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows for the eggs after the limits were lifted. In 2016, they finally gave it their best shot in the one:1. The brakes locked, and the car got in a pretty sizeable wreck. The driver was fine, but the car wasn't. The crash was later found to be the result of a busted ABS sensor. Although the light came on on the dash, Forst, who was driving at the time, was no doubt a little too engaged in driving to notice.

الفئة