Roughly five and a half years have passed since Mercedes-AMG took the Frankfurt Motor Show by storm with the launch of the Project One concept. It wasn’t until June 2022 that the next production version was launched, without the word “Project” anymore. And now, deliveries of F1-powered engines have finally begun. Peepers from Affalterbach took to social media to reveal three images depicting the first customer’s car.
Wearing German “ON1” plates, the hypercar is mostly black but with Petronas green accents and lots of white three-pointed stars on the rear. We also see the tip of the roof scoop being colored red and there is a white “AMG” lettering that stands out on the front grille. Truly a race car for the road, the fastest road-legal production vehicle around the Nürburgring, Hockenheim, and Red Bull Ring was limited to just 275 copies.
It’s unknown who owned the first One, but F1 drivers Lewis Hamilton, Nico Rosberg and David Coulthard have signed their names on the dotted line to buy the electric, handcrafted monster. in fact, Sun writing back in September 2017 when Project One revealed that LH was expecting to take delivery of two cars, one of which would be gifted to his father Anthony. It was also reported that real estate mogul Manny Khoshbin, actor Mark Wahlberg and tennis star Ion Țiriac were among the 275 customers.
As previously reported, production starts in August 2022 and the cars are assembled at AMG’s facility in Coventry, UK. The complex hybrid powertrain featuring a turbocharged 1.6-liter V6 engine and four electric motors comes from the Mercedes‑AMG High Performance Powertrains division in Brixworth. Dedicated production facilities had to be created with help from Multimatic, with each having to go through 16 assembly and testing stations.
Certainly one of the most spectacular cars of our time, the all-wheel drive AMG One took a bumpy road in its production process. Making the 566-horsepower ICE comply with Euro 6 regulations was one of the biggest hurdles faced by the engineers, a V6 stalling at 1,200 rpm instead of the 5,000 rpm that occurs in an F1 car. The combustion engine cranks up to 11,000 rpm and has to be rebuilt every 50,000 kilometers (31,000 miles), but we highly doubt that many Ones will be used extensively.
