THE £22,000,000 KOENIGSEGG THAT WAS STOLEN IN MONACO — Transcript

This is one of the rarest, most expensive, and fastest hypercars on the planet. One of just six customer cars ever made. It belonged, or so the world thought, to a famous F1 driver. It was [music] driven around Monaco, attended famous rallies. It was literally photographed everywhere, and then one day it just vanished. The story goes that it had been stolen, smuggled out of Europe, and that Interpol were hunting for it across the world, and that the man who drove it was mixed up with some seriously dangerous people. But almost none of this was actually true. So, this [music] is the real story of what the world knows to be Adrian Sutil's Koenigsegg One:1. [music] And in a moment, this is going to sell live. The 2015 Koenigsegg One:1. Right in front of me for what is likely to be a world [music] record figure for a Koenigsegg ever sold. Before we find out how [music] this ends, you need to know how it ended up here in the first place. And to do that, we've got to go right back to the beginning. But to understand this car, you also have to understand just how special it really is. Koenigsegg did something with this car that nobody had done before. They built a road car with 1 horsepower for every kilogram it weighs, hence the name One:1. As a result, it generated 1 MW of power.

[music] And Koenigsegg made just six for customers in the entire world, plus one prototype. But even among those six, this one is very different. [music] This is chassis 7108, known as JC. The entire body is exposed carbon fiber under a clear lacquer. What you're looking at right now is the actual carbon weave of the car itself. China pink accents, pink brake calipers, carbon air [music] core wheels, some of the lightest wheels ever made for a hypercar. Pink stitching right throughout the cabin, and JC, the initials of the first owner, on the side of the carbon buttresses. But, to truly understand why this car could sell for record-breaking millions, I headed to the Goodwood Festival of Speed to talk to Christian von Koenigsegg [music] himself, the very man who created the One:1. We kept on pushing the boundaries of how much power we could get out of our out of our cars. We started seeing that [music] the power in the cars went up more than the weight went up, and we were starting to get close to this magical number no one had ever touched, meaning to have a car [music] that is not heavier per kilo than the power it has. And that was not an easy task, because we weren't really overweight as it was. We were pushing to make the cars really light. Yeah. Regardless. So, you basically had to take the Agera R, reconfigure it, put every little thing on a scale, every nut and bolt. Like, what can we shave off? Can we drill a hole through here? Can we remove one layer of carbon here?

Yes, maybe. Then maybe we need to put [music] a little reinforcement in this corner over here.

And it was just a relentless pursuit of shaving shaving weight everywhere, in engine, in gearbox, in the chassis, in the interior, until we reached the goal.

So, we we ran this I remember these Excel charts where we just put in grams of weight saving while we tweaked the power of the engine. So, 1 MW of power for the first time in the world, establishing the megacar.

So, is that where megacar came from? That was where megacar came from? That's when Koenigsegg moved from hyper to megacar.

So, we established the megacar category with the One:1. If I'm not wrong, I think we are the only ones making One:1 cars still today. Let's say fully homologated Right. Sure. You made six customer cars plus the one prototype. What was the reason to make them in such small numbers? um they were very hard to make. They were very much like piling off weight everywhere on all the small bits and pieces from from the previous versions. This was a much more expensive car than we had ever produced. So, we didn't know the demand demand for it when we set out. It was like almost double the cost of anything we'd previously done.

Wow. And is that because the R&D was just wild on the roof. Yeah. And so we said if we make it very exclusive first of all we we can deal with it in a hand craftsmanship way which we kind of needed to get all the weight out of it. And secondly, it becomes very exclusive so it's probably easier to sell that for this elevated price. We quickly sold out and had people screaming for more cars but then that was that.

I think that's added to the legend of that car that it is so rare.

Yeah. You know, so And it was definitely a world's first in history and still today if if you take a well-kept One to One out on a track and maybe you put a slightly more modern tire on it pretty much can set lap records still today. Yeah. Yeah. Did he say track? Well, it just so happens on my wild journey of filming cars [music] I actually did drive one of the seven mega rare Koenigsegg One to Ones on track [music] and this is what it's really like. The pickup of the engine is outstanding.

You really have to brace yourself. What a dramatic sense of occasion this is. I mean, I can actually feel my hair flapping around on my head and what is pulling that much grip.

Now, I know we're on a tight, fairly slow circuit for a car like this. It's actually probably the least conducive stretch of tarmac to the performance of this car. But, it's speaking volumes about the overall package is just how agile it is around a circuit, which I would class as being actually fairly slow.

Now, that agility was in part to two substantial updates on this car. So, first of all, we'll talk about the rubber, the Michelin bespoke developed Cup 2 tires.

As soon as you get some heat into them, this thing just grips, sticks, and goes.

It is It's actually something to behold, the performance of this thing. What this thing must be like on a on a high downforce circuit like a Silverstone.

Or at Le Mans. Speaking of Le Mans, this has a LMP inspired rear wing. It's an active rear wing.

That short burst there was 110 mph. That's a bit of context for you. That's all.

As soon as the heat's in the Michelins, the torque is deployable just 100% of the time.

And we're also running the now famous Triplex suspension, which reduces the squat of the rear, keeping it stable and level.

But, it also allows to get maximum contact patch with the tires, providing huge grip.

I've got sweaty palms, my hands dislodged, and I've got jaw ache from all the smiling I'm doing.

What a machine. So, this car was originally delivered new through Koenigsegg's German dealer, Marcus Eßer, to a Chinese collector who kept a lot of his cars in Düsseldorf.

You may be thinking, "What's with the pink?" Well, in China, pink is a color of luxury and sophistication, and this was the original owner's statement. It was delivered in 2015. Today, it's covered barely 4,000 km, and yet it is one of the most recognizable Koenigseggs ever built. And this is where it becomes a little personal for me, because just a few years ago, on the Ghost Squadron tour, Koenigsegg's annual road rally, I saw this car in the flesh here on the Ghost Squadron tour. Isn't it Look at this. It's ridiculous. Just goes on and on and on. One of the Look, I know all Koenigseggs are incredibly rare, but as far as editions go, one of seven, the Koenigsegg One:1. It's like a an Agera on steroids. And guess who was driving it. There is nothing else on Earth that looks like this car. And the man behind the wheel, who presumably owned the car, was none other than former Formula One driver Adrian [music] Sutil. To everyone in the hypercar world, this was simply Sutil's One:1, his car. But that turned out to be the first of many things in this story that aren't quite true. But who was Adrian Sutil, and was his Koenigsegg actually stolen? For a long time, Adrian Sutil looked like a man who had everything. He was one of the quickest midfield drivers in Formula 1, racing for Force India, the last of the naturally aspirated generation, which in my opinion is the

Yeah. You know, so And it was definitely a world's first in history and still today if if you take a well-kept One to One out on a track and maybe you put a slightly more modern tire on it

pretty much can set lap records still today. Yeah. Yeah. Did he say track? Well, it just so happens on my wild journey of filming cars [music] I actually did drive one of the seven mega rare Koenigsegg One to

Ones on track [music] and this is what it's really like. The pickup of the engine is outstanding.

You really have to brace yourself. What a dramatic sense of occasion this is. I mean, I can actually feel my hair flapping around on my head and what is pulling that much grip.

Now, I know we're on a tight, fairly slow circuit for a car like this. It's actually probably the least conducive stretch of tarmac to the performance of this car. But, it's speaking volumes about the overall package is just how

agile it is around a circuit, which I would class as being actually fairly slow.

Now, that agility was in part to two substantial updates on this car. So, first of all, we'll talk about the rubber, the Michelin bespoke developed Cup 2 tires.

As soon as you get some heat into them, this thing just grips, sticks, and goes.

It is It's actually something to behold, the performance of this thing. What this thing must be like on a on a high downforce circuit like a Silverstone.

Or at Le Mans. Speaking of Le Mans, this has a LMP inspired rear wing. It's an active rear wing.

That short burst there was 110 mph. That's a bit of context for you. That's all.

As soon as the heat's in the Michelins, the torque is deployable just 100% of the time.

And we're also running the now famous Triplex suspension, which reduces the squat of the rear, keeping it stable and level.

But, it also allows to get maximum contact patch with the tires, providing huge grip.

I've got sweaty palms, my hands dislodged, and I've got jaw ache from all the smiling I'm doing.

What a machine. So, this car was originally delivered new through Koenigsegg's German dealer, Marcus Eßer, to a Chinese collector who kept a lot of his cars in Düsseldorf.

You may be thinking, "What's with the pink?" Well, in China, pink is a color of luxury and sophistication, and this was the original owner's statement. It was delivered in 2015. Today, it's covered barely 4,000 km, and yet it is

one of the most recognizable Koenigseggs ever built. And this is where it becomes a little personal for me, because just a few years ago, on the Ghost Squadron tour, Koenigsegg's annual road rally, I saw this car in the flesh here on the

Ghost Squadron tour. Isn't it Look at this. It's ridiculous. Just goes on and on and on. One of the Look, I know all Koenigseggs are incredibly rare, but as far as editions go, one of seven, the Koenigsegg One:1. It's like a an Agera

on steroids. And guess who was driving it. There is nothing else on Earth that looks like this car. And the man behind the wheel, who presumably owned the car, was none other than former Formula One driver Adrian [music] Sutil. To everyone

in the hypercar world, this was simply Sutil's One:1, his car. But that turned out to be the first of many things in this story that aren't quite true. But who was Adrian Sutil, and was his Koenigsegg actually stolen? For a long

time, Adrian Sutil looked like a man who had everything. He was one of the quickest midfield drivers in Formula 1, racing for Force India, the last of the naturally aspirated generation, which in my opinion is the greatest. He was

famous for his pace in the wet, and people talked about him [music] as a future top team driver. He had the career, he had the money, he had the lifestyle, and a collection [music] of cars most of us could only dream about.

On the surface, he was on top of the world. And then, in 2011, it all started to unravel.

I think not easy to make the right decision absolutely on the right moment. After a race, at a party in Shanghai, Sutil was involved in an altercation and struck another man with a champagne glass.

The injury was pretty serious, resulting in 24 [music] stitches. Sutil always insisted it was an accident, that he hadn't realized he was still holding the glass.

The court didn't accept it. He was convicted of grievous [music] bodily harm, given an 18-month suspended sentence and a 200,000 euro fine.

After that, his Formula 1 career never recovered. He lost his seat, and he was gone from the sport. For [music] years, that was the controversy that defined him. But it turned out to be nothing next to what came later. [music]

Because what was really going on behind the scenes is what led to the multi-million pound Koenigsegg vanish. Everyone called this Sutil's car, but the secret was Sutil [music] never actually owned it. When journalists later went through the documents, the picture was completely

different. The first Chinese owner sold the car back to the dealer, Esser. [music] Esser then sold it to a leasing company called AIL, and Sutil, a good customer of Esser's, rented it from AIL on a monthly basis. He paid to use it

long-term, but on paper the car belonged to AIL. Now, remember this because it's a really important part of the story coming soon. In a total shock twist, in November 2025, Adrian Sutil was arrested in Germany as part of an investigation

into alleged luxury car financing fraud. [music] The claim being that high-value cars had been financed multiple times, sometimes with four finance agreements on the same car from finance companies in multiple countries. Sutil denies the allegations, and today the case is still

ongoing. But, when the authorities went looking for the cars, the One:1 was located in Monaco, which was outside of their jurisdiction. And as a result, they weren't able to touch it. And yet, one night, it just [music] disappeared.

This story exploded. The One:1 had been stolen, smuggled out of Europe. There were even rumors connecting it to organized crime and to the Russian private military organization, the Wagner Group. Even Interpol were searching around the world for this

famous Koenigsegg. How had a car this famous, this unique, [music] a full carbon-bodied Koenigsegg covered in pink been stolen from one of the lowest crime rates, heavily protected, and strictly policed countries in the world without a trace? A hunt for the car was carried

out over [music] months and months with no trace as to where it could be. But, it wasn't actually the police [music] or Interpol that ended up finding the car, but German journalists. It wasn't in Russia, it wasn't hiding overseas, it

was in [music] a quiet building in Bavaria. And why Bavaria? Well, you probably guessed it. The building the car was hiding in was owned [music] by AIL, the leasing company. The journalists got a tip-off and were able to check the chassis number, 7108, and

the paperwork, and confirmed it was the car. [music] What really happened was far less dramatic than what Interpol were chasing. When Sutil was arrested, the leasing [music] company who had owned the car all along simply took it back.

It's alleged that Sutil's lawyer claimed [music] the car was stolen. To this day, no one knows why and the rumors spread like wildfire. The car the world believed had been stolen from Adrian Sutil had never really been his in the

first place and was never technically stolen. It was essentially repossessed by the leasing company who owned it all along. But this doesn't explain how one of the rarest cars in the world is about to be sold in an auction in Germany as

the plot takes yet another twist. [music] Since Sutil's arrest and AIL reclaiming the car, quietly [music] it has been sold to a mysterious private collector and that collector is now selling the car.

And that is why I'm heading to Germany to go and see this car for the first time in years and find out what the world's most famous Koenigsegg could possibly sell for. So I'm traveling a few hundred miles to the shores of Lake

Tegernsee [music] to be in the room when the hammer goes down on the most talked about Koenigsegg ever made.

And this could be enormous. There's never been a Koenigsegg sale like this before and with all the craziness and chaos that's been following this car around, some are suggesting that it could be the most expensive Koenigsegg ever sold. And an extraordinary car

require an extraordinary [music] event. This is the Concours of Elegance Germany. For the next 24 hours, it is coast to the highest concentration of millionaires in the country and they are all here for one thing, car shopping.

That's yours. [applause] So here we are at the event. Now I haven't seen this Koenigsegg since the Ghost Squadron tour in 2024.

And Adrian Sutil was driving it at that time. And I can't believe that I'm actually about to see this thing again under wild circumstances.

[music] Oh my god. I mean, I've forgotten how unbelievable this thing is. Just look at it. The intricacy of it.

It's not until you get up close to it. For example, we've got KNC, Koenigsegg naked carbon. That's what KNC stands for. Here on these arched louvers, contrasting against clear coat gloss.

And then if we move down here, there's a lot of the pink accents going on. The brake calipers, this very intricate detailing here on the inlay on these air core carbon fiber wheels.

At the time, these were the world's lightest wheels for their size. Koenigsegg developed a proprietary carbon forging process where they were able to make the inside of these spokes hollow even during the carbon forming process. And the sculpt, I mean, the

arrow sculpt. Look at it. You know, at the time this thing was in the automotive industry absolutely groundbreaking because no one on a road legal homologated car had managed to achieve this this ultra ultra exclusive one-to-one power-to-weight ratio. And it

is so raw and so pure. There's nothing quite like it. The way it shifts gear, the way it feels, the sound of it, the vibrations to this carbon chassis. As I mentioned, this has been used on road trips rallies

and it's so clean. It's like it just rolled out of the factory. And now here I am in front of it again after those years. The real question now on everyone's minds is a car like this with a story like that, what's it worth and

[music] what is someone willing to pay for it? So, the money's in the room, the phones are hot, and the auction is about to start. And yet, I have no idea which way this is going [music] to go. Okay,

so this is the crazy part. I've been given access to this live auction. [music] Which I won't go into it, but it's very hard to get in this room without proof of funds.

The 2015 Koenigsegg 1:1, ultra rare 21st century icon, bidders aligned up at 5 Yeah, it's way too fast.

at 5 at 5 Saras, thank you. 5 million 500,000 at 5 million 500,000 We are at 6 million euros now at 6 million. Against you, Mark. Against you, Saras. At 6 million.

6 million 500,000 we have offered at 6 million 5 This, by the way, is 6 million before fees and [music] local taxes.

7 million is bid. At 7 million euros. At 7 million, ladies and gentlemen. Here at Pincot. Attention.

At 7 million. At 7 million 200,000 if we have it now. 200,000. Thank you.

We have a continental bidder coming through there. At 7 million 200,000. Any more? 7 million 500,000 At 7 million 500,000. No one offering any more. Last chance. Everywhere else.

No more. Hammer's falling at 7 million 500,000. Thank you very much indeed, ladies and gentlemen.

[applause] Well, there you have it. After all the craziness, the chase, the car hunt, the speculation of it being stolen, its controversial history, also it being one of the fastest cars in the world, one of the rarest Koenigseggs ever made,

despite all of that, the hammer went down before local taxes and fees. So, if that car was brought to the UK, based on fees and local taxes, it would be around about this much.

Pretty substantial price [music] for a car with a pretty substantial history. So, there you go. Thanks for watching.

Be sure to subscribe because the next video coming might be even crazier than this one.