At least eight Mercedes-AMG Project Ones for Oz

Mercedes-AMG has revealed key details including the price, availability and mechanical layout of its thousand-horsepower, Formula 1-inspired Project One hypercar at a sneak reveal at the Nürburgring 24 Hour race.

No price has yet been set yet for Australia, for which at least eight of just 275 to be built globally already have confirmed buyers, despite an estimated price of $A3.4-3.6 million. North American pricing is $US2.54 million.

Mercedes-Benz Australia is negotiating for a bigger allocation to satisfy at least another seven customers, however, demand exceeds supply globally even though the 2018 hypercar won’t be sold in China.

Mercedes-AMG insists the car will become the new hypercar benchmark, thanks in part to 750kW (1000hp) of power from its Formula 1-based 1.6-litre turbocharged V6 and four electric motors.

The all-wheel drive hypercar won’t just deliver levels of performance unparalleled outside the world’s racetracks, but will be able to run as a pure battery-electric car for up to 25km and, unique for a hypercar, its zero-emission mode will be front-wheel drive.

That should make it capable of circumventing limitations on internal-combustion, high-powered cars in some city centres around the world.

“It shifts up the boundaries of what is technically feasible,” Moers said. “We are the first to make pure bred F1 technology roadworthy.

“Our objective is not speed, but to be the benchmark.

“If we have a strategy and we move into a new era of performance at AMG, maybe it’s good to have something that opens the door in a very authentic way to that new era and this is it.

“Plug-in hybrid is going to be the future for AMG. We get more performance and more efficiency and what’s wrong with that?” he asked.

Technically, though, Ferrari used a Formula 1 engine as the basis of its F50 supercar back in 1995, though Moers insists the Project One would be a class forward from the least loved of the hypercar Ferraris.

“We are talking about a high-performance hybrid, with one combustion engine and four electric motors. The combustion engine comes from Brixworth, from the same people who delivered three consecutive Formula 1 world championships for drivers and manufacturers.

“The redline is at 11,000 and it has a high-tech turbo, which is driven by an 80kW electric motor. Its batteries are the same technology and arrangement as in F1, but we will build four times the storage, with about 25km of pure electric range.

“We have reached thermal efficiency of 43 per cent. Nobody else has managed anything like that, street legal.”

By comparison, AMG’s 4.0-litre biturbo V8 has a thermal efficiency of around 25 per cent.

Race-bred

The two-seat hard-top coupe follows Formula 1 practice by being based around a carbon-fibre chassis tub, with the engine mounted directly to the tub and the gearbox and differential unit mounted directly to the engine.

Both the engine and eight-speed gearbox will be fully stressed parts of the chassis layout, while AMG has chosen to use a computer controlled clutch on a traditional manual gearbox, rather than the dual-clutch transmission layout most supercar makers, including Bugatti, favour.

The first deliveries of the car are due late next year, with Moers hoping to finish its production run by the end of 2020, and AMG already has one “mule” prototype running to help with initial verification of the powertrain and chassis concept.

But the key part of the technology is the Project One’s powertrain itself, which it insists it pulled directly from its Formula 1 program.

Though heavily revised from the W08 EQ Power+ F1 car used by Lewis Hamilton and Valteri Bottas this weekend in Monaco, Moers insists the modifications are only basic.

“The idle speed is 1100rpm and in F1 it’s 3800 or 4000. It revs to 11,000rpm, but in F1 it’s 13,500rpm.

“We have to move combustion ratio, for example, that’s what changes. In F1 they run Lambda that’s way more than one. But we can’t because of emissions. We have the same cylinder-head, same crank housing but a different crankshaft.”

For all that, though, Moers insists customers won’t need the usual array of Formula 1 race engineers and laptop computers to start the engine.

“Prospective buyers have been asking if they will require a support crew or dedicated lubricants to run it. My answer is always ‘no’. It will be a street car. You keep it plugged in in the garage. You fill it with 98 (RON fuel).”

Hyper-hybrid

The trickier parts of the powertrain will be the way it combines its electrified and internal-combustion power.

A ground-breaking engine in Formula 1, the AMG V6 splits its single, large turbocharger, with the exhaust turbine moved to the back of the engine with the exhaust system and the compressor wheel sitting at the front of the engine where the cooler air is, and a shaft running through the engine’s vee angle to join them together.

Firstly, there is the power and torque from the tiny 1.6-litre V6 (which AMG wouldn’t talk about, but which must be somewhere around 350kW).

Then it also has a 100kW electric motor (the MGU-K for “kinetic” in AMG-speak) directly attached to the engine’s crankshaft and another 80kW (the MGU-H for “heat”) electric motor that spins up the turbocharger to eliminate turbo lag.

“The 80kW from the MGU-H is not so important to rev it (the turbocharger compressor) up but it’s important for regeneration,” Moers insisted. “It could be a lot smaller to rev and still spin it up.”

Any excess energy the MGU-H harvests can be sent directly to the MGU-K to punch more electric torque directly through the crankshaft.

Then there a 120kW electric motor for each front wheel, which use essentially the same construction and design as the MGU-K, but in different housings.

While Moers would not be drawn on the car’s target weight, he did confirm that the entire powertrain would weight about 420kg, with the battery pack accounting for 100kg of that.

The battery, built by its F1 supplier ABC, runs the same chemistry, cells and connectors as Hamilton’s racer, but is four times larger to add in the Project One’s zero-emission capability.

What makes the Project One particularly complicated is that all of its electric motors act as both motors and generators to recharge the fast-discharge battery, which has an 800V-12V converter sitting on top of its housing.

Engine shelf life

The extreme forces acting inside the highly stressed 1.6-litre V6 mean AMG will only rate it for 50,000km before it needs to be “remanufactured”.

“We have an understanding of about 50,000km. This is OK for us. I think that's good enough," Moers insisted.

"That's the life of the engine. Then we do some rework, like in a race car."

After 50,000km, the engines would either be rebuilt by AMG or, depending on the work needed, replaced.

However, it has yet to put a price tag on either a new engine or a rebuild, and AMG didn’t rule out customers choosing to buy the car with a spare engine ready to go.

This year’s Formula 1 rules dictate that each driver can only use four hybrid power units for the entire 20-race season, though that drops to three of the V6 internal-combustion engines next year.

While that’s just over 6000km of Grand Prix racing, the engines and electrified power units could easily double that with four hours of practice and a one-hour qualifying shootout each race weekend.

Raised eyebrows

The supercar industry’s widespread reaction to Moers’ claims of using a Formula 1 motor has been disbelief.

Ferrari basically said it doesn’t believe Mercedes-AMG. Ferrari, the only other race-winning Formula 1 engine supplier this year, clearly doubts whether AMG’s hypercar was a) using an F1-sourced engine and b) whether that was a good idea in the first place.

In an interview back at the Geneva motor show in March, Ferrari’s road-car chief engineer, Michael Leiters, said there was no way Ferrari would follow suit.

"Putting an F1 engine into a road car? We already did it with the F50 and I'm not convinced it works.

"An F1 engine runs at 16,000rpm. How can you use a car that revs to 16,000rpm on the street? You can't, and if it doesn't rev to 16,000rpm, you have to ask the question, what remains of the Formula 1 engine?

"Instead of actual F1 engine, I'm convinced it's better to take some concepts and innovations from a Formula 1 car. To make a supercar, I prefer to do it from scratch", he insisted.

The all-wheel drive Project One hypercar has fine torque vectoring at both ends, and eliminates the packaging difficulties of anti-roll bars via five-link suspension systems at both ends.

AMG has separated the vertical bump and roll tasks in the suspension with two springs in series sharing a single damper, while the longest rear pushrod in the car world is mounted directly to the upright and in large part defines the car’s aerodynamic package.

It will use a variable ride height and a variable aerodynamic package, to get the best from its custom-developed Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 285/35 19 front and 335/30 20 tyres, which ride on center-lock wheels.

The transmission, too, will be similar to the Formula 1 car’s eight-speed unit, strengthened for longevity, and using the electric motors to “fill in” any acceleration holes during gear changes.

Moers insists the car will have different driving modes, ranging from the zero-emission front-drive EV mode to a mode so aggressive it will be similar to a GP qualifying set-up.