All the hype surrounding Mercedes-AMG’s upcoming hybrid hypercar has led to a flurry of speculation about every corner and crevice of the yet-to-be-named machine. One particular piece of detail we can at least rest easy about now is the car’s engine, after none other than AMG boss Tobias Moers told Car Advice that the hypercar will not only use an F1-derived engine, but an actual F1 engine.
Should that be the case, the AMG hypercar will employ the 1.6-liter turbocharged V-6 engine with an electric drive and an Emergency Recovery System, the same engine currently being used by the Mercedes F1 W07 Formula One car. That’s startling news at the very least because Mercedes-AMG is effectively putting a Formula One engine into an actual road car that will be sold commercially, albeit in very limited quantities.
Needless to say, Mercedes-AMG isn’t just dropping the F1 engine into the AMG hypercar and calling it a day. Moers admitted that the company will have to “change some things” in order to account for differences in set-up between the two cars. But the AMG boss did say that the differences are manageable enough that the application could work under the right circumstances.
Moers didn’t say how much output the AMG hypercar would have, but given that Mercedes F1’s recent admission that its powertrain is capable of producing 1,000 horsepower in qualifying, that number should be a good baseline for the hypercar, putting it ahead of the Ferrari LaFerrari, McLaren P1, and Porsche 918 Spyder.
In separate news, it appears that the hypercar isn’t going to be a stand-alone model. In a conversation with Motor Trend, Jens Thiemer, vice president of marketing for Mercedes-Benz Cars group, indicated that the hypercar could actually find itself being a part of Mercedes’ recently-unveiled EQ sub-brand, as its halo model.
Continue after the jump to read the full story.
from Top Speed http://ift.tt/2dZ4eIF
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