Stephen Ottley
 

How to turn an F1 engine into a road car powerplant

Mercedes F1 engine boss reveals insight into development of AMG Project One hypercar.

Lewis Hamilton at the 2017 British Grand Prix. Photo: Getty Images
 

How to turn an F1 engine into a road car powerplant

Stephen Ottley

Mercedes F1 engine boss reveals insight into development of AMG Project One hypercar.

The man responsible for Mercedes-AMG's dominant Formula One powertrain has spoken about the challenges of turning it into a road car engine.

Andy Cowell is head of Mercedes-AMG's F1 powertrain operation in the UK that has developed the 1.6-litre turbocharged V6 hybrid system that powers Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas in the racing series. It will be the foundation for the engine and hybrid system that will power the Mercedes-AMG Project One hypercar, as the brand enters the same high-performance road car league as the Ferrari LaFerrai, Porsche 918 Spyder and McLaren P1.

"It’s a fascinating project, the AMG Project One hypercar," Cowell said in an interview at the British Grand Prix. "It is taking the Formula One power unit and putting it into the back of a two seater sports car and then two MGU-Ks on the front axle, so independent drive to the two wheels, so 160hp per wheel. So the combined power is over 1000hp."

Cowell discussed the work that has gone into converting the engine from a track-only proposition to something that can be driven on the road, both in terms of driveability but also fuel economy.

The Mercedes-AMG Project One powertrain. Photo: Supplied

"It is a pretty incredible powertrain, to be honest, both in terms of creating a car that can go round the Nurburgring in impressive lap times but also in terms of driving across town and on a dual carriageway. The fuel economy is impressive; this is something that... Tobias came up with the idea, rang me up, said is it possible? I rang him back after two weeks of doing a little bit of work during lunchtimes, to see what we could."

Cowell explained the major differences between the two very different applications for the engine.

"Fascinating actually doing that development work and doing the transition from Formula One to road car," he said. "The vast majority of it carries across. Clearly things like fuel and emissions need to be managed but that works fairly seamlessly. We’re targeting 50,000 kilometers so about that and in terms of the duty cycle it is quite considerably different.

"If you look at a high performance road car... if you’ve got somebody that drives at five per cent of the time at full throttle, that’s quite remarkable. Today we’ve got people driving Formula One cars round this track with 70 per cent full throttle and so that’s where you gain an awful lot of the benefit, swapped from the bespoke fuels that all the fuel companies develop for Formula One into a pump fuel, the cylinder pressure drops, the loading drops and everything comes to you, so in terms of that, that durability, that’s the easy bit."

He confirmed that the V6 engines and hybrid systems will be built at the same facility as the F1 engine, which is in Brixworth in England.

"We’ve now got a group of about 150 people," Cowell said. "At Brixworth, that group will grow over the coming year and the target is to build 275 powertrains so the powertrain will be built at Brixworth, having done the development work."

The German firm has already confirmed that the petrol-electric powertrain will produce 736kW of power in road car form. Unlike the rear-wheel drive F1 car the Project One will use the V6 to power the rear wheels while the hybrid systems will deploy on the front axles to make it an all-wheel drive machine.

The production version of the Project One is set to be unveiled at September's Frankfurt motor show before entering production in 2018.

 
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