The Koenig Turbo Evolution Is A 1,000-HP Twin-Turbocharged Mess Of 1980s Excess

Screenshot: The Smoking Tire on YouTube

There are tuner cars, and then there are tuner cars built on the bones of 1980s Italian supercars. The Reagan deficit spending boom from ‘82 to ‘87 saw scores of newly-minted yuppie millionaires looking for ways to shovel their windfall gains into the furnace of conspicuous consumption. German tuning house Koenig Specials GmbH — and founder Willy König — was more than happy to help them accomplish their goals.

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For years Koenig built high-dollar high-power race-bred monsters like the Competition Evo Twin-Turbo Ferrari Testarossa seen here in the most recent video from The Smoking Tire.

The Wildest 80’s Ferrari Tuner Car Ever: Koenig’s 1,000HP Twin-Turbo Testarossa! – TheSmokingTire

With the benefit of hindsight, this cocaine-fueled big boost brute probably wasn’t all that well made when it was new. A Testarossa that wasn’t fucked with by Germans wasn’t all that well made to begin with, so when you tack on a fiberglass Strosek body kit and nearly triple the power output of the car’s 5.0-liter flat-12 engine, it’s going to be a sketchy machine. Matt Farah, who has driven thousands of cars (and many of them sketchy), described this as “the sketchiest car I’ve driven in a long time.”

“There’s a lot about this car that is dumb and/or bad,” says Farah after dropping the hammer and spooling the boost. He goes on to explain that regardless of the nervous handling and perhaps shoddy craftsmanship, the engine just works. There’s no replacement for displacement, except gobs of boost, and this car has both. If you’re looking for one of the craziest cars ever sold, this is definitely on the list. You had to pay a whole lot of money for it back in the day, and it probably won’t be cheap in the modern market either. Only 21 of these were built, and probably for good reason.