You could buy a Valkyrie,
you can buy – well, if you're lucky –
you can buy all sorts of hypercars.
I promise you that the owner of an AMG One is then winding up through the gears,
as there's nothing else that feels like what they're driving.
[Jack Rix] Chris, the AMG One. Now, do you remember what you thought
when Merc... So, they revealed this car back in 2017,
lots of fanfare.
We're going to put a Formula 1 engine
in a hypercar that you can drive on road and track.
Do you remember your sort of initial thoughts?
- Just thought it was part of a massive willy-waving exercise
between certain brands that wanted to get caught up in a hypercar race.
That normally results in great things for people like you and I,
because you get super-expensive, very, very trick vehicles
and people are trying to outdo each other.
We love a bit of competition, don't we? - Yeah.
That started all the way back
with Lamborghini and Ferrari in the 60s and that's continued now.
It's like they want to get into tussles. Love that.
I always thought that the idea of taking an engine that had proved to be
so difficult to work in a motorsport environment...
Don't forget, before the hybrid-era F1, I remember going to watch the test
at Estoril with Mercedes-Benz, and one car did half a lap in the first day.
That's how difficult these things were.
So when they turned up on the grid in Melbourne a month later
and they sort of worked, we were in awe of what engineers could achieve.
But it's clear this vehicle was never going to be easy to make
and its gestation has been plagued with issues.
It's a small world,
the automotive world.
So I know lots of people that had worked on it or around it. - Yes.
And they were all really scratching their heads. - The suppliers that have been trying to get the gearbox...
- They were all there thinking, "This is just a... This is needless.
Why are we doing this?" And I think they probably regretted...
- CEOs have come and gone. You know, it's...
- Well, yeah. But I love the fact they persevered.
It was an interesting day. - What was the sort of set up?
How long did you have, in theory, with the car.
We had a day to make a film. By a day, I'd say, you know,
a three-hour morning session
and a four-hour afternoon session, that should be enough to make a film.
That's a lot less than we'd normally have on Top Gear.
We're very spoilt children.
We normally expect the car
to be delivered to our own facility, where we can do what we want,
and we have a couple of days.
But it was very clear that Mercedes-AMG was not going to do that.
We were going to bolted
into a conventional launch calendar but be given more than most people.
So it was a privilege to go. I didn't think we'd get invited.
So from the top I have to say, thank you very much for inviting us.
They didn't need to. But, yeah, it didn't go to plan.
- We set it up beautifully.
It's a very, very, very complicated car.
But it was given to us under the premise that it now worked.
Come and have a go.
I don't know to this day whether they knew, or they suspected,
that the car might be problematic and they were styling it out
but it's just some pain they had to go through. Or whether
they were genuinely shocked that the vehicle had so many issues.
But we had two cars, both of which had quite big technical issues on the day.
And at the end, the shots you saw were shot probably in 45 minutes
at the end of the day.
And the car had some quite big restrictions in terms
of how I could use it.
What mode could be used, the way the aerodynamics were deployed.
It was very tricky and I think a humbling experience for all involved.
But I think the film was honest. And I think what's clear also is that
I love the bravery, I love the ambition, just the blind stupidity
of trying to do that.
- What would we have to write about as journalists if car companies didn't make...
- I know. And it was... - ..mad decisions.
- There's something about that engine, a super high-revving 1.6-litre
- Single turbo... - ..that's producing that, sort of, you know 1,000 horsepower.
When you when you wind it up and it goes to whatever, 10,000rpm,
you do go, "Crikey. This is just an experience unlike anything else."
That's the key thing.
You could buy a Valkyrie, you can buy – well, if you're lucky –
you could buy all sorts of hypercars.
I promise you that the owner of an AMG-One is then winding
up through the gears,
as there's nothing else that feels like what they're driving.
It's a very, very strange vehicle. - And that's what billionaires do, right?
They're collecting unique experiences. So they might have a Nevera over there
"Oh, you should feel that thing there."
- And history has a way of celebrating heroic failures.
You know, a lot of the cars that we now revere
were rubbish when they were new and we forget how rubbish they were.
The 964 RS is a great example. It's a car that's now worth
£300,000, the great lightweight Porsche of the early 90s.
Go and read the first reviews of that car when it came out.
Everyone went, "Why have they made... Why have they ruined the 964?"
And now everyone thinks they're great.
I could give you so... - Because it's got character and foibles.
- Well, exactly. So...
But I think this will be one. And they're not making many of them.
- Yeah.
- You know, the F50
when it came out. The F50 was, "Oh, God, the F40 was greater.
The McLaren F1 is far better."
The F50 was almost forgotten about at the time.
Now, after the McLaren
F1, the most valuable production car
you can buy on the planet because they built so few of them.
And they're not making many of these either.
I mean, they do need to make it work.
It's the naked ambition of trying to make a Formula 1
engine work on the road.
And the number of times you imagine that the people
trying to make that engine work were saying,
"Who the hell
said we should do this?!
What moron said we should do this?!"
- Midnight on a Friday night and they're still scratching their heads over...
- And of course,
the irony is they're now releasing cars with not much power...
less power, that can do 20,000 miles between service intervals.
They could probably
have 10 other solutions to produce even more power than that engine and
bolt it into that car, but they didn't.
And it has a Formula 1 engine on the road.
- It's a bonkers exercise. But it did work. So, once
you'd figured it out, you got it in...
What was the name of the mode? The sort of full everything on quali lap?
- Das silly bastard mode.
- Das silly bastard mode!
- You wind it up on the track.
The thing that you need to know is that the gearshift is very slow,
to the point it feels like an original F1 transmission in the Ferrari, where you go "Mmmm,
one Mississippi, two, mmmm."
And things have become so quick and instant
now, that was my initial reaction. What have they done here?
So I don't see how anyone taller than me would fit in it.
The sitting position is really weird.
You need 19 people to get it to work, when it wants to work.
And then I got in it and thought the gearbox isn't working properly. But I had this...
Something in my head was reluctant to make that observation and criticise it.
And this is why you should listen to people with big foreheads who've got white
coats on. Because I said, "What's wrong with the gearbox?
The gearshift is so slow. Is it in sort of a limp-home mode?" And he went,
"No, that's how slow the gearshift is."
And I went, "Well, why've you done that?" And he said, "Well, because we've got so much electricity
being produced that we need to get rid of,
that we fill the gear changes with electric torque
so you're still going forwards."
So that's
why your brain says this doesn't sound right, but I'm still accelerating.
- And once you're accelerating
it's just zzzzup! - You don't need a fast gear change
because they plug it with torque, so your brain's going,
"Well, this is..." So, I don't know how to describe it.
It's like
something that's really raucous and full-on, but it's calming at the same time.
It's a strange experience. - A bit like the Lamborghini
Sián. They basically...
- It's exactly the same strategy,
but the hybrid system in the AMG One is producing so much more electricity
because it's so efficient. And they can't just get rid of it.
It can't have a blow-off valve like in a turbocharger,
so you've got extra electricity and it manifests itself in two different ways.
One, they fill the gaps between the gears.
And the other one is, if they've got too much electric,
if you're at any phase on a racetrack doing a lap, they'll suddenly cut the ICE,
the engine, and use electricity. But this can happen in a braking zone.
- Yep. - So when that happened to me, I had a full code brown.
So I'm fully braking hard into T1 at Nürburgring, which is downhill.
So you go over the crest, you pick your braking spot
and always know where it is on the right
hand side. Bang, I'm braking now, and the engine just stops.
- And you think you're going straight on. - Well you think, "I'm going straight on."
But then the man with the massive forehead, who's German, goes, "Ah,
yes, we are just getting rid of some electricity."
I'm thinking, couldn't you do it in a way that makes me not soil myself?
- Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Yeah, it was...
It was a whole new thing. And do you know what?
We spend all of our time dealing with perfection.
Sometimes things have to go wrong,
and sometimes a TV show has to tell you what it's about.
- All right,
just one final point, then, on the
AMG One, Chris. The noise. - The noise is an issue.
When the car
ran at Goodwood the month before, it was running with the Valkyrie.
Valkyrie, normally aspirated V12, open pipes.
Everyone said, best-sounding car ever. Everyone whinged about the AMG One
whispering its way up the hill because it's turbocharged
and doesn't make much noise. When you're in it,
it's the noisiest thing I've ever sat in. Had to have earplugs in, felt quite ill.
It's incredibly mechanical, very noisy car.
- Quite unpleasant when it's...? - It's an interesting sound.
- Yeah.
- It's not like anything else, but I've not...
That's the modern way for me.
Don't annoy people outside the car.
- Oh, yeah. - Enjoy inside the car.
- Singer DLS, GT4 RS
- But I did have a moment
where I looked right, and they've fitted in a full Mercedes
suite of telephone and hi-fi. Useless.
You can't use them, even idle
you can't hear the hi-fi when it's up loudest. - OK, top tip.
- There you go. Don't use the radio. - Don't
bother using your radio. - Go for the radio delete option.