Mercedes-Benz AMG One review
“The AMG One delivers on the dream of an F1 engine in a road car. It’s simultaneously flawed, an ill-advised folly and one of the most fascinating machines ever made”
Good stuff
Celebrating AMG’s struggle to get an F1 engine into a road car. Well-trimmed cabin and tenacious handling in lizard-like max attack mode
Bad stuff
The driving position is weird, the seat isn’t supportive enough and it’s deafeningly loud inside
What is it?
The Mercedes-AMG One is first and foremost a hybrid hypercar. A 1,049bhp technical showcase for what Mercedes can achieve when it really puts its collective brain (and many euros) to a near impossible task: putting the engine from a 2016 Formula One world championship-winning racing car into a street-legal vehicle. And selling it to people without the skills of Sir Lewis. Gulp.
But the AMG One is also a story in itself. A car that was first presented in 2017, promising deliveries in 2019. Or 2020. Then there was a global pandemic, a critical parts shortage, and even by the time Mercedes’ dominant F1 form started to slip in 2022, the British-built One still wasn’t ready.
At long, long last, the One finally made it into production, with the first of the 275 customers receiving their £2.3m toys in autumn 2022 and the last by the end of 2023.
How does it work?
A quick interlude now to explain or remind just how complicated this car is. At its heart sits a 1.6-litre single turbocharged V6. The turbo is effectively split along a shaft between the intake and exhaust and this allows a 120bhp electric motor to sit amid it, spooling up the boost long before exhaust pressure would have it ready. This is what F1 commentators call the MGU-H (Motor Generator Unit – Heat) and it effectively reduces turbo lag.
On the back of the internal combustion engine, which produces 566bhp (a staggering 353bhp per litre) is a bigger 161bhp electric motor (MGU-K, to F1 commentators, K for Kinetic) and they both drive the rear axle. Each of the front wheels has another 161bhp electric motor, which F1 commentators don’t have to worry about.
Peak combined power is a claimed 1,049bhp and no torque figure has been published because it is too difficult to calculate. Given that half the work is undertaken by electrons, we can probably summarise it as ‘plenty’.
The basic structure of the car is made from carbon-fibre, as is the bodywork. The engine is rigidly mounted to the tub. Almost no-one does this because the downsides are enormous: the engine vibrations are transmitted directly into the chassis, the carbon acts like a speaker amplifying them and you end up having to wear ear defenders. Alongside Aston’s Valkyrie the only other cars across the last 30 years that have followed suit are the Ferrari F50, Caparo T1 and BAC Mono.
The advantages are rigidity and lightweight. No need for the rear subframe to be so heavy when the suspension can be directly mounted to the drivetrain. The suspension itself is a complicated pushrod set-up, the transmission is closely related to the F1 cars and built by Xtrac and the car has substantial heaters to pre-warm the cats before start-up.
And that presumably makes it a trifle fast?
Mercedes’s claims of 0-62mph in 2.9sec, 0-124mph in 7.0sec and a 219mph maximum still seem pretty seismic, but they make it no faster than a McLaren 765LT. Having said that, the McLaren feels uncomfortably fast at times and we’re not sure how much faster a car needs to be, nor at which point we need to judge everything by how fast it is.
After all, most £1 million+ cars will get annihilated by a £35k motorcycle. But given the One weighs a bloated 1,695kg, it’s within the clutches of a lot of less expensive cars, not least Ferrari’s ballistic SF90 Stradale.
But don’t look at it in those terms – the experience is much more important than the numbers here.
Read More https://www.topgear.com/car-reviews/mercedes-benz/amg-one
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