Good things come to those who wait.
And if you’re World Champion F1 driver Nico Rosberg your patience is rewarded with the delivery of ‘the most complex car in the world’– the AMG One road-legal £2.5million racing car.
Rosberg – most famous for winning the 2016 F1 World Championship, beating rival and Mercedes teammate Sir Lewis Hamilton – is one of only a handful of people lucky enough to own the 1,063hp hybrid hypercar.
Having first customised his Mercedes Project One Concept back in 2018 – taking fans along in a video on his immensely popular YouTube channel – Nico’s back with a two-parter as he picks up the keys to one of the world’s most covetable motors.
We had an exclusive preview of Nico’s behind the scenes tour as he collects his Mercedes-AMG creation with its F1 engine.
So, not only is this hypercar a once-in-a-blue-moon occurrence in the world of Mercedes-AMG – the last one was the CLK GTR Strassenversion – but it’s also a golden egg of the sports car/hyper car world too.
And no-one is better placed to know or explain this than Nico.
His father is Keke Rosberg, 1982 F1 World Champion, and during Nico’s six-year stint with Mercedes F1 he secured the World Champion title himself with the W07 car.
‘The 1.6-litre V6 – fully hybrid – is inspired by my F1 car at the time [2015]. The whole powertrain unit is based on the F1 engine – the Mercedes F1 W06 Hybrid,’ he explains.
It’s of course modified to fit emissions standards and road legal levels of vibration, durability and mileage, but it’s the closest vehicle on the roads to the actual grand prix car that proved so dominant in the late 2010s.
The AMG One is described by the manufacturer as ‘the most extraordinary, contemporary, road-legal racing car to emerge from Affalterbach’.
As Nico and the AMG team talk through the car, it’s quickly evident that the vast challenges of turning an F1-winning machine into a road-legal beast are the reason behind the project delay.
Jochen Hermann, CTO Mercedes-AMG, thought ‘the exhaust would be the biggest challenge, but the software was the most challenging’.
‘This is why it took longer than thought. You’re not just buying a car, you’re buying a racing team’, he jokes to Nico. A £2.5m racing team.
Amusingly Nico actually checks he’s fully paid up as he signs on the dotted line.
Of the 275 units, rumour has it that Lewis Hamilton has ordered two (one for himself and one for his father), while ex-F1 driver David Coulthard and actor Mark Walhberg have coughed up for one each.
The AMG One’s E Performance plug-in hybrid 1.6-litre V6 turbo petrol engine and four electric motors – for the turbocharger, crankshaft and front axle – are combined with a directly cooled 800-volt battery from Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1’s engine builder, High Performance Powertrains.
Accelerating from 0 to 124mph takes seven seconds, 0-187mph just 15.6 seconds – these stats are even more mind blowing when you realise it’s the first car in the world to have the ‘Strat 2’ programme used for F1 qualifying.
The One’s Strat 2 mode maximises active aerodynamics and tighter chassis tuning, lowering the vehicle for full performance.
These are the F1-to-road-legal software challenges Hermann is talking about: ‘Putting that engineering team you had – the people [17 Nico specifies] who helped you to start the car, or do a quick lap or a long stint – into sensors, software and hardware is one of the key elements why it took us longer than we thought it would’.
Unveiled in September 2017, the AMG One finally went into production in August 2022, even though Rosberg customised his over six years ago.
But it’s a finished work of art now.
The aerodynamics of the car are central to performance and to its cut-out open-vent head-turning road presence. The F1 exhausts are the only unnecessary but nostalgic touch – and fans will love them.
‘Un-bel-iev-able’, Nico stressed when he first set eyes on the display car five years ago.
To get an F1 champion who drives and owns the world’s rarest cars – Rosberg already has a Rimac Nevera – to gaze speechless with his hands on his head should be enough to earn the design team an immediate raise.
And now the cars are here in the flesh supercar spotters should take note: Rosberg admits in today’s video that he had his AMG One sneakily updated to ‘Ferrari’s colour from Maranello – Grigio Ferro’.
His car is also the first one to have a black star, a unique touch he explains came from his wife Vivian who is an interior designer.
So, if you’re lucky enough to see an AMG One in the flesh and it has these two distinctive tells, then whip your camera out because F1 royalty is driving past.
When Nico gets inside the car, it’s like being taken into an F1 cockpit, not least in the way he contorts himself past the scissor doors and low roof.
‘This is racy – this is proper F1: the F1 seat position, F1 lights and the proper steering wheel.
‘It’s not 100 per cent – the steering wheel is a bit bigger, which makes sense because it’s more comfortable. DRS, Neutral, Push to Pass, lights flashing.
‘The pedal position; brake, throttle and footrest– super racy feel’.
Other than two small display screens, and a rearview camera instead of a mirror, it’s scarce inside. Nico chose to have minimal accents and keep all the stitching one colour.
Sadly, for the other buyers of the AMG One, you’ll need to win an F1 world championship before you can get the most glamorous interior feature of all: Nico Rosberg, F1 World Champion is stitched on the centre console.
‘That’s definitely pretty cool’, Nico admits.
But the personalisation doesn’t stop there. Two sets of noise cancelling earbuds are engraved with Nico’s name.
These ‘headsets’ are provided because the sound of the engine is so loud both the driver and passenger need noise cancelling protection.
Sebastian Fäsch, Development Driver for Mercedes-AMG, drove from Stuggart to Barcelona without a headset but said that ‘after 20 minutes it started hurting’.
‘It’s 120dB inside’, Sebastian confirms. To put that into context a thunderclap or a rock concert is 120dB. As is an aircraft taking off.
Mercedes-AMG did a lot of work to ensure the F1 engine – that’s normally small enough to fit into the glove compartment of a regular car but in this case had extra treatment to make it road efficient – ‘sounds as good as possible, and optimises the raw sound’, Hermann says.
The engine mounting and dampening was engineered but there’s no software on the sound Hermann confirms; ‘it’s pure mechanical’.
Nico’s own car even has a tiny piece of his old W06 welded on.
In a second video coming Sunday Rosberg takes the AMG One out on road and track.
Without a doubt the engine roar is the closest ‘normal’ drivers will get to an F1 experience, and you’d forgive passersby from thinking they’re hearing a grand prix car.
Even for Nico it ‘brings back all the memories with the engine sound’.
Shifting up through the newly-developed automated seven-speed transmission with its four-disc carbon racing clutch delivers Nico and Seb seamless 11,000 rpm.
‘Woah – this has power. Real power!’ Nico exclaims as they drive along the German roads.
And then Nico just cuts the engine and flips the car into EV mode, which only has one gear. And immediately this 120dB car is noiseless – just the light whirring of the motor is left.
‘When it’s a bit noisy and I want to calm down – EV mode. Incredible’.
The Finnish-German racing driver turned sustainability investor, who spends post-F1 life dedicated to e-mobility, clearly appreciates the ingenuity hybrid powertrains offer, and the complexity that Mercedes-AMG has overcome, to a much deeper degree than other people.
And then just as you get used to watching Rosberg and Fasch chat in silence, the V6 is unleashed in Track Mode.
Track Mode isn’t allowed on public roads and ESP can only be switched off on track to keep people safe.
Here the ‘software engineers’ come into play, as the car checks all its aero parts. The ride height is lowered, manual is activated, and torque vectoring is turned off.
‘It’s a different car now’, Sebastian states. Only the video can do justice to what this car can achieve.
Other than Rosberg roaring ‘ohhhhh this is nuts!’, you’d need a lip-reader to be able to understand Rosberg and Fasch over the engine as they whip round the track.
If Rosberg goes up the banking, the car has 5G. That’s G-Force equivalent to five times the driver’s weight.
Top speed is ‘limited’ to 219mph. Good luck to the Popo trying to keep up.
In 2022 the AMG One set the benchmark lap time at the Nürburgring Nordschleife. DTM driver Maro Engel put it round the infamous track in 6 minutes 35.183 seconds to hand Mercedes-AMG the fastest road-legal production car and super sports car records.
That is no mean feat as the AMG One is, as Fasch states, the ‘most complex car in the world at the moment’.
You wouldn’t think that though as Rosberg casually does one-handed doughnuts in the evening light.
But then there are only 34 F1 champions in history.
