The chief technical officer of road cars at Ferrari has given some insight regarding Mercedes-AMG’s F1-powered Project One; insight that isn’t exactly positive. After chatting with Motoring, Michael Leiters said that this segment is not one that Ferrari would approach in the future.
“Putting an F1 engine into a road car? We already did it with the F50 and I’m not convinced it works.” he told the Australian publication. He went on to mention the problems regarding the way the engine revs and that a car would likely never reach 16 000 r/min on the street.
“An F1 engine runs at 16 000 r/min… How can you use a car that revs to 16 000 r/min on the street? You can’t and if [the Mercedes-AMG Project One] doesn’t rev to 16 000 r/min, you have to ask the question, what remains of the Formula 1 engine?”
Leiters went on to say that it’s usually best to build a supercar from the ground-up rather than sourcing an engine from a racing car. He goes on to admit that deriving certain technology from Formula One is a more ideal approach.
Mercedes-AMG’s Project One is said to be revealed in at Frankfurt this year with a price tag of about R32 million and an engine lifespan of 50 000 km. Only 275 of these crazy machines will be built.
