Koenigsegg: The Cartoon, the Fire and the Fighter Jet Hangar

Christian von Koenigsegg was born in Stockholm on the 2nd of July, 1972.

The family name is old.

The von Koenigsegg line traces back to the year 1171 to knights in Swabia, in what is now southern Germany.

The logo on the cars is the family coat of arms.

But the story does not start with a coat of arms.

It starts with a cartoon.

When Christian was five, he watched a Norwegian stop-motion film called The Pinchcliffe Grand Prix.

In Norway, it is Flåklypa Grand Prix, and it is a classic across Scandinavia.

It is about a bicycle repairman who builds a racing car in his workshop and takes it to a Grand Prix.

The car is called Il Tempo Gigante.

A man in a shed building a car to beat the big teams.

Christian has pointed to that film as where it all began.

A year later, at six, he drove a go-kart for the first time.

He has called it one of the best days of his life.

So far, a Scandinavian childhood.

What came next was not normal.

Before he was 22, Christian had already run businesses of his own.

The money from them became the first funding, because on the 12th of August 1994, at 22 years old, he started Koenigsegg Automotive.

Think about the timing.

The McLaren F1 had been unveiled in 1992, built by Gordon Murray with a Formula 1 team behind it, and it was about to become the fastest production car on Earth, and a 22-year-old in Sweden decides that is the target.

He did not have a factory.

He had a workshop in Olofström, a small town near the southeast coast.

He had his own money, a grant of around $200,000 from the Swedish Technical Development Board, and his father.

Jesko von Koenigsegg, who ran an energy technology company, became an early investor and financed the operation for more than three years.

Remember the name Jesko.