Someone Craned a Koenigsegg and an F1 Car Onto a $75 Million Yacht, Because Monaco

Grand Prix weekend in Monaco has always been the most theatrical event in all of motorsport — a place where the paddock spills into the harbor, yachts moonlight as private hospitality suites, and the line between sport and flat-out spectacle evaporates. But even by the principality’s deranged standards, what turned up in the marina ahead of the 2026 race stopped people dead in their tracks.

Sitting on the deck of the Stella Maris — a 236-foot vessel valued at $75 million — were two machines that had absolutely no business being on a boat: a Koenigsegg Jesko and an Audi Formula 1 car. Both were craned aboard by Tom Claeren, founder of Ultimate Superyacht, a man who has made a hobby of turning floating real estate into automotive showrooms during race week.

The Jesko — a hypercar that runs somewhere between $2.8 million and $3 million depending on spec — claimed the yacht’s helipad as its personal podium. The Audi F1 car sat nearby, completing a tableau that looks engineered in a lab to break the internet.

This Wasn’t Improvised Theater

Don’t mistake this for spur-of-the-moment showboating. It was a calculated, logistically gnarly operation requiring coordination between the yacht crew, transportation teams, and automotive handlers. Hoisting something as rare and irreplaceable as a Koenigsegg Jesko onto a moving deck takes the kind of planning most people reserve for launching a company — not finding a parking spot.

Wealth Theater, Meet the Soul of Monaco

For a race weekend increasingly roasted over its eye-watering prices, stunts like this play a strange double role. They’re the easiest thing in the world to mock as peak wealth theater — and yet they’re also undeniably part of what makes Monaco feel unlike anything else on the calendar. The harbor doesn’t just host boats during race week; it hosts a one-upmanship arms race, and Claeren just lobbed a grenade into it.

Why the Koenigsegg Steals the Whole Show

For gearheads, the Jesko alone is worth the price of admission. It’s not merely expensive — it’s one of the most technically sophisticated road cars ever built, engineered with an almost unhinged obsession for speed and mechanical purity. Perching it on a superyacht deck in Monaco is either a magnificent absurdity or the only logical destination for a car always meant to live in rarified air. Probably both. Koenigsegg even has its own shady history with this harbor: a $22 million One:1 once vanished here under murky circumstances, a story that reads like fiction but isn’t.

Whether you see Claeren’s operation as inspired or grotesquely excessive probably says as much about you as it does about Monaco. Either way, between the circus on the water and the cinematic mythology around the race itself, Hollywood has already decided this place is too good a story to leave off the screen.

Related Reading

• Monaco’s Race Weekend Price Shock and the Growing Backlash
• Cadillac’s 685-HP F1 Blackwing Could Change America’s Role in F1
• The $22 Million Koenigsegg One:1 That Disappeared
• Inside Formula 1’s Miami Takeover

About the Author

Shawn Henry

Administrator

Shawn Henry has spent years writing about cars, and it shows—not in a resume kind of way, but in how he talks about them. He's the type who'll notice the weird trim option nobody remembers and actually know why it mattered. At Backfire News, he covers pretty much the whole spectrum: off-road trucks and trail builds, performance cars, racing, and the collector market. He's comfortable getting into the technical weeds, but he never forgets that most people read about cars because cars are fun, not because they want a spec sheet. His beat runs from classic and collector vehicles to overlanding culture, modified performance builds, new automotive tech, and the industry news that actually affects what ends up in your driveway. Mostly, though, Shawn thinks the best car stories are about people—the builds they pour money into, the road trips, the communities that form around a shared obsession. That's the stuff he likes writing about, and it's what you'll find in his work here.

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