Last week, Koenigsegg surprised the automotive world with the reveal of the new CC850, which pairs the styling of the very first Koenigsegg road car with a drivetrain and chassis derived from the world-beating Jesko. One of the most fascinating aspects of the CC850 is the transmission, which can operate in full automatic mode, or act just like a conventional six-speed manual transmission complete with clutch pedal and gorgeous gated shifter. How can a transmission be both manual and automatic? At Monterey Car Week, I spent a few minutes chatting with Christian von Koenigsegg to figure out exactly how this “Engage Shifter System” works.

The innovative new transmission is based on the “Light Speed Transmission” nine-speed gearbox found in the Koenigsegg Jesko. It’s a fascinatingly unconventional gearbox: Instead of using a traditional flywheel and a single or dual clutch, the Koenigsegg transmission puts the clutches where you’d normally find synchronizers in a manual gearbox. These clutches, six of them in total, handle both gear selection (engaging and disengaging as needed to create nine distinct drive ratios) and power transmission. With the LST gearbox and no flywheel, Koenigsegg claims the Jesko powerplant revs faster than any other production-car engine in history.

That gave company founder Christian von Koenigsegg an idea. “It came about when we started driving the Jesko,” von Koenigsegg told me at the Koenigsegg display at The Quail,…