GT Mk IV

Make
Ford
Segment
Coupe

Mercedes is doing a good job of keeping the world salivating as it doles out small samples of the new F1-inspired hypercar it's cooking up. Known internally as the R50, the automaker is hard at work ensuring that this AMG is unlike any model its in-house tuner has built before. The majority of performance car brands like to throw around the phrase "F1-inspired" as if it would make a road car any better. ESPN caught up with Mercedes Motorsport boss Toto Wolff to learn what makes his company's F1-inspired supercar unique.

For starters, Wolff told ESPN that the R50 would house Mercedes' own turbocharged V6 straight from its F1 car. Rather than building a street car engine and modeling it after an F1 motor, the Mercedes hypercar will feature the real deal, an actual engine used in professional racing. Real F1 technology in a road car is quite a difficult technical exercise if you imagine all the cooling that is necessary, but the data I have seen gives me goose bumps. So it's really good," says Wolff. A V6 might not sound like much, but Ford uses the same basic engine architecture for its new supercar, the GT. As we all know in today's world there are many replacements for displacement.

Anything less than a V8 tends to make displacement freaks laugh, but in racing, the smaller engines save weight and use efficiency as a key to spending less time in the pit lane. When the R50 comes marching out, it won't be the V6 alone that's helping. An electric drivetrain will be there assisting in wheel-turning duty in order to achieve more than 1,000 horsepower. When the R50 is revealed next year in celebration of Mercedes-AMG's 50th anniversary, it will meet the Aston Martin AM-RB 001 and SCG's 003CS as competition. We can't wait to see these cars do battle on the track. All of them are built under the same philosophy of taking a race car and doing the minimum required to make it legal. What a time to be alive.