Three cars stood out at the Paris Motor Show, and one of them wasn’t even there. It wasn’t at the show because it’s about two years from production, Daimler’s development boss Dr Thomas Weber said the night before the show opened. The other reason it wasn’t there was that, even as Herr Dr Weber was on stage, the unnamed hypercar was being blow-dried in the wind tunnel in Sindelfingen.
AMG has spent the last year denying it was making a hypercar – yet it is being made, mostly because AMG is making so much money that it’s being allowed to show off for its 50th birthday next year. AMG makes a lot of that cash in Australia; we’re regularly AMG’s third-biggest market.
This time it won’t be a poor joint venture with McLaren, because it has no need for the British F1 team’s cred: its own F1 team is making McLaren look like also-rans.
Aston Martin might have joined up with Red Bull Racing for its AM-RB 001 hypercar, but Benz is sexing it up by collaborating with, Benz. AMG boss Tobias Moers says the car is a fully carbon-fibre two-seater, with what is a mildly softened F1 powertrain stuffed in the back.
While the F1 car’s 1.6-litre turbo V6 sounds like it does 5000rpm, it actually revs to 15,000. Moers suggested that in the interests of longevity the unnamed AMG hypercar might be capped at 11,000rpm, but it‘ll include all the fast discharge hybrid systems on the turbo and also the regenerative braking.
It will be all-wheel drive, using the same hybrid systems the F1 car uses and they’ll build 200 or 300 examples. Moers said the F1 engine was surprisingly reliable as a road engine. Of course, that was before shrapnel from Hamilton’s V6 was spread all over Malaysia.
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