After spending five years at Mercedes, Valtteri Bottas changed teams and signed with Alfa Romeo for the 2022 season. He obviously didn't cancel his AMG One when he left the three-pointed star, and collection day has finally arrived. The 33-year-old Finnish driver took to Instagram to show off his F1-engined hypercar finished in a lovely shade of blue with loads of exposed carbon fiber surfaces.
It's not the first AMG One to be delivered as the folks from Affalterbach have been handing over the long-awaited machines to customers since January 2023. Bottas' former teammate, seven-time F1 champ Lewis Hamilton, is also among those 275 buyers who have signed on the dotted line to purchase what is currently the fastest production car at the Nürburgring and Monza. Another Mercedes F1 driver, Nico Rosberg, is on the list as well.
As a refresher, the Project One was shown as a concept in September 2017 but it wasn't until August 2022 that production started. Major development hurdles pushed back the hypercar's launch but AMG ultimately found a solution to have the turbocharged 1.6-liter V6 engine idle at 1,200 rpm instead of 5,000 rpm as is the case with the F1 car. Meeting increasingly stringent emissions regulations was also a pain in the derrière.
The intricate six-cylinder engine is fragile in the sense it must be rebuilt once every 50,000 kilometers (31,068 miles), not that many AMG Ones will ever reach that mileage anyway… It's the type of car that will spend the better part of its life locked up in a climate-controlled garage, with owners patiently waiting for the vehicle's value to go up. Given the rarity and the fact Mercedes has said it won't do an F1-engined road car ever again, it's likely bound to happen.
The AMG One isn't built at any of the factories where Mercedes assembles its regular cars. The all-wheel-drive hypercar with four electric motors is hand-assembled in at AMG's facility in Coventry, UK using a hybrid powertrain made by the Mercedes‑AMG High Performance Powertrains division in Brixworth. A dedicated production facility was necessary, and Multimatic helps Mercedes build the CLK GTR’s indirect successor.
With a combined output of 1,049 horsepower, an 11,000 rpm redline, and a seven-speed automated manual transmission, this is no ordinary AMG. It sprints to 62 mph (100 km/h) in 2.9 seconds, to 124 mph (200 km/h) in 7 seconds, and to 186 mph (300 km/h) in 15.6 seconds before topping out at 219 mph (352 km/h). Mercedes claims "there's never been anything like that. But now it will always be there," adding the One hypercar has "performance from another planet."
