F1 FOR THE ROAD
The ‘Grand Prix car’ anyone (with a spare £2m!) can drive gets our 2018 number plate pullout off to a roaring start
TOMORROW, for the first time, Lewis Hamilton will drive in anger the Formula 1 car that he hopes will carry him to an historic fifth World Championship, and Mercedes to a fifth consecutive Constructor’s World Championship.
After F1’s long winter break, the teams are gathering in Barcelona for eight days of testing. He will find out if his team has improved on last season’s fast but temperamental racer, the W08. And because the teams go to huge lengths to disguise their true performance in testing, he won’t know how his new W09 compares to its rivals until the flag drops on the first race of
the season exactly one month from today, in Australia.
He’s currently the short favourite to win the drivers’ championship.
And he will become the second most successful F1 driver in history, sharing five titles with Juan Manuel Fangio and just two shy of Michael Schumacher’s haul, if he wins the title this year.
After the season ends he’ll take delivery of a MercedesAMG Project One, the extraordinary new £2.4 million, 1,100-horsepower road-going version of an F1 car, which shares its engine with his Sunday drive.
‘It’s a beast,’ Hamilton says. ‘I’ve been talking to Mercedes for a long time about doing a real top-of-the-line hypercar and bringing F1 technology to the road and now we’ve done it, so it feels a bit like my baby as well. I’m hoping to have the first one.’
Putting a genuine F1 engine into a car you can drive on the road every day is incredibly difficult.
The tiny 1.6-litre V6 engine – the same capacity as a standard hatchback’s – produces its stupendous power output with the help of a turbocharger and Formula 1’s KERS hybrid system. You can drive it for 13 miles silently and emissions-free using its four electric motors.
The engine will be made in Britain alongside the race engines at Mercedes-AMG High Performance Powertrains in Brixworth, Northamptonshire.
The eight-speed gearbox and the carbon-fibre chassis and bodywork will be made in the UK too.
The biggest problem was persuading the motor to start at the push of a button when it usually needs a team of engineers to get it running. Reliability has been less of an issue. While Lewis will go through three engines in a single season, the Project One’s motor can be driven for 30,000 miles before a rebuild.
The buyers can afford the maintenance bills. All 275 were sold before it was officially revealed, with 20 coming to the UK.
Rather than selling to highprofile billionaires and celebrities, Mercedes approached its most loyal, long-term customers first. Despite the price, Project One was four times oversubscribed by serious buyers.
They won’t be disappointed.
ALTHOUGH the exhaust needs a silencer for road use, the Project One still sounds just like an F1 car, starting with a hard, sharp, deafening bark.
Few performance figures have yet been released, but unsurprisingly it is devastatingly fast.
It has a top speed in excess of 220mph and a 0-200kph acceleration time of just six seconds, half a second faster than the Bugatti Chiron, the current king of hypercars.
‘When I’m sitting in my F1 car and the engine starts and you know you’re about to go and drive at the craziest speeds, I get the biggest smile on my face,’ says Lewis.
‘When I sat in this car and they started the engine for the first time, I had that same grin. That’s a good sign.’
‘I’m so proud of what Mercedes has done. I’ve been a part of this, and helped develop it, and to finally see it come to life is magical. This is history.’