THE ONE

Can an F1 engine really work in a road car? Chris packed a pair of brave pants and went to the Nürburgring to find out

- CHRIS HARRIS

Somewhere within the relationship between promises and hindsight probably lurks a human truth that could rid our species of its more worrying traits. It might be presented something like this: don't overpromise, because when you fail to deliver you will be left with two potentially paralysing choices - hold your hands up and say you were too ambitious, but that the potential glory was worth the risk of failure. Or just try to blag your way out of it. Most of us defer to the latter. What does this have to do with a Mercedes sports car? Bear with me.

Until very recently I had no expectation of ever driving the AMG One. Since upsetting the previous boss I've been off the Christmas card list and would be lying if I said this worried me at all. The brand is still capable of brilliance but has recently regressed to the kind of crowd-pleasing that undoes its amazing history. Then a WhatsApp message arrived from the editor saying we had five hours with the car and this could be used to make a film for the television show and a story for the magazine. The message made me smile - I have been fascinated by the One since it was first announced. A genuine attempt to put the fiendishly complicated Mercedes Formula One powertrain into a road-legal supercar.

There was a dash of JFK's "we do this not because it is easy, but because it is hard" about the Mercedes announcement back in 2017, and I loved that. I still love that sitting here wondering how best to explain the confusing day I spent with the One. But there is also the suspicion that the individual who made the decision to announce a road car with an F1 engine hadn't asked the people who actually designed the Formula One engines if such a project was even possible before making that public utterance. Given the use of a time machine, I'm not sure that individual would make the same decision again.