Features

Prepare for your jaw to drop to the floor if you ever dare to open the price list to a Koenigsegg CCX.

The asking price for this obscure Swedish-manufactured hypercar starts at the euro equivalent of £420,000, to which you have the option of adding £3,700 for traction control, £8,800 for a set of carbon-fibre wheels, £12,000 for ceramic brakes, not to mention £36,000 for a diamond-encrusted key.

Just recently, one other addition has been made. This reads as follows: 'Carbon rear wing (Top Gear Special Edition)'. It's a modest looking aerofoil, a boomerang of neatly woven carbon fibre nestling between the humps that bookend the car's tail, all yours for £4,600.

This is a small extra, with a major significance. It's the modification that helped transform the Koenigsegg CCX into the fastest road car ever to lap the Top Gear test track - quicker than the former record holder, the Zonda F, or the Maserati MC12, or even a Ferrari Enzo.

In truth, the CCX only pulled off its landmark lap of 1 minute, 17.6 seconds on the second time of trying. Before the mods, it had tried to kill the Stig.

Rewind to the CCX's first Top Gear outing in early May and it could be witnessed sliding perilously from apex to apex, writhing and snapping like it was far from allowing itself to be tamed.

Just after recording a time of 1 minute, 20.4 seconds, it pitched into a tank-slapper on the entry to the infamous Follow Through, before sliding across 150yds of grass and burying its precision-sculpted carbon snout into the tyre wall. That was the Stig's first ever crash on the TG track.

Koenigsegg had two excuses lined up in readiness. First, the CCX that had been lent to Top Gear came kitted-out with the pursuit of maximum speed in mind; its bodywork was focused on reducing drag, rather than creating the downforce that would keep it held down on any tight and twisting track.

A 245mph maximum is the result, along with a highest-ever speed of 193mph seen in Clarkson's hands on the short runway section that cuts through the centre of the TG track.

Christian von Koenigsegg, founder of the eponymously titled car company, details the other reason for his creation's wayward behaviour.

"We had hurried to get the car ready for its debut at the Geneva motor show in March, then we had faced two months of snow and rain in Sweden. Its visit to the Top Gear track was the first time it had ever been driven on a track in the dry, so we had not had time to fix its set-up."