The Mercedes-AMG One – Mercedes’ road-going F1-inspired Hypercar – takes the Nurburgring record for a production car.
It’s easy to forget that Mercedes revealed an F1-inspired hypercar plan almost six years ago, the Mercedes-AMG Project One, as it took until this summer for it to actually arrive.
But when you look at the complexity of taking F1-tech and making it usable on-road – and factor in Covid and Chips – it’s no real surprise it’s taken so long.
That complexity sees AMG take an F1-inspired 1.6-litre V6 spinning at up to 11,000 rpm with electric turbo and air spring valves churning out 558bhp, together with a pair of electric motors at the front, one at the rear and a fourth from the turbo, in total delivering 1,033bhp, enough for 0-62mph in 2.9 seconds and 124mph in 7.0 seconds.
Now, with production of the 275 Mercedes AMG-Ones underway, Mercedes has taken the ONE off to the Nurburgring and set a record time – 6:35.183 minutes – for a production car, taking the Porsche 911 GT2 RS’s record.
AMG brand ambassador Maro Engel, who drove the record lap, said:
I didn’t expect that we would be able to set such a lap time with these track conditions. In some crucial areas of the track, it hadn’t dried completely yet and was therefore tricky. That was a special challenge. We tried to find the optimal deployment strategy during the pre-tests. Like Lewis Hamilton and George Russell on their race weekends, I also had to deploy the electrical energy of the hybrid drive in the best possible way. That’s not easy, especially with this length of track.
With better conditions, it looks like the ONE could get around quicker, but the time was enough for the production car record and a new super sports car record too.
But this is probably ‘Peak ICE’ at the Nurburgring, and future records are almost certainly going to be EVs.
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