The Swedish JDM
Koenigsegg's Agera and its Japanese-inspired roots
Koenigsegg is a Swedish car manufacturer known for producing visually stunning cars, in very low quantities, with technical specifications that are borderline incomprehensible - their latest car, the CC850, has a gated manual and a nine-speed automatic gearbox ??
Back in 2010, Koenigsegg launched the Agera, a brand new platform following the CC platform. It launched to great success, being voted as Hypercar of the Year by Top Gear. Over the following 5 years, the Agera evolved into the Agera R, Agera S, One:1 and then the Agera RS
The Agera RS was pitched as a more track-focussed version of the Agera, with 1150 bhp as standard or a cool 1360 bhp if you opted for the "megawatt package". The Agera RS became the fastest production car in 2017 with an average speed of 277.75mph over two runs
Although rare, the 25 Agera RS’s are quite well documented by online car registries, Instagram pages and car spotters. I’d seen many of them online over the years, and became fairly familiar with them - sadly about as familiar as I’ll ever get to a $2mil+ hypercar
Not long ago though I saw someone on Instagram talking about an Agera RSR that they were looking to bid on in an upcoming auction with RM Sothebys. The RSR was not something I’d heard of before. My mind instantly connected that name to the Porsche 911 RSR, so my first thought was that it was an exclusive, track only version of the RS. I did a little bit of googling, and it turns out that the Agera RSR was a hyper-limited run of just 3 cars, produced exclusively for Japanese customers. The RSR was fundamentally the same as the RS but had some aerodynamic improvements taken from the One:1 project. I don’t know how or why these 3 cars were made exclusively for Japanese customers.
From what I can see, one of the three cars is daily driven by its owner (mad respect), but the other two aren’t seen nearly as often. So when one of them went up for auction, it was a pretty big deal; the first time an RSR had been sold, and potentially the first time one would leave Japan.
The car ended up selling for $3.38mil 2016 Koenigsegg Agera RSR | Dubai | RM Sotheby's (excluding VAT and import duties, yikes) to a lucky customer in UAE
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