The BMW Group Classic podcast is back with Episode 75 and a special guest. For the latest episode of the “Classic Heart” series moderated by JP Rathgen, none other than Christian von Koenigsegg was invited. The interview was recorded at the Aurora Skandinavian Concours in Southern Sweden at the end of June. The complete episode is attached below, but in particular part of our attention was drawn.
Mr. Koenigsegg praised BMWS One and the only super sports car and described the legendary M1 as “one of my absolute favorite cars”. In fact, the Swedish automotive engineer and the entrepreneur remembers getting a brochure of the E26 from a Koenigsegg test driver who was part of the team that was responsible for testing the street version of the BMW M1:
“I got a brochure of the M1 and remember that I saw this car as a child, and I appreciated this brochure. I actually returned it to our test driver because he was an M1 fan. It is one of my favorite cars. The sculpture, the proportions, the shape of it, only timeless and classic.
The interview not only focuses on the M1. The mastermind behind Hypercars such as CCX, Agera, Jesko and the four-seater-generation also supplemented BMW for groundbreaking art. He is a big fan of Andy Warhol’s colorful M1 Procar, which achieved a respectable sixth place in the 1979 Le Mans:
“It’s incredible. It looks extremely cool. It sees the execution extremely rough
To a certain extent, Koenigsegg’s journey is bound to an important player in the hypercar scene with BMW. The 53-year-old businessman likes to remember a kiosk who visited a kiosk in 1994 and bought a magazine in which the BMW V12 McLaren F1 could be seen on his cover. This moment triggers the idea of founding his own Supercar company:
“Ah, that’s the way of my vision, thinking and dreaming, and now someone else has gone out and has changed the shape a little. If I don’t do it now, I will never do it.”
Christian von Koenigsegg has no BMW by 2025. However, his wife and two sons drive cars with the famous round:
“It is definitely a large brand in the family. The largest percentage of cars is BMW.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elmtbekkhse
Video: BMW Group Classic
