Now It Can Be Told: Part 1 of 2; The inside story behind the stunning Chrysler supercar that's ambushing the other guys at the Detroit show.

Byline: KEVIN A. WILSON

Only a handful of people knew. Most of the folks working up Chrysler's crop of new show cars for 2004 weren't let in on it. Most of the press didn't catch wind of it until it drove onto the stage at the end of the company's Jan. 4 press conference revealing those "ordinary'' concept cars. Surprise was the point. After hijacking attention at the 2003 Detroit show with the Viper-powered Dodge Tomahawk motorbike, the top guns at Chrysler wanted to do something even bigger this year in a bid to upstage the arrivals of the expected stars from across town, the 2005 Ford Mustang and Chevy Corvette.

"Tomahawk was somewhat tongue in cheek, a design statement more than an engineering statement. We wanted to do something really credible, and we wanted something nobody would expect from Chrysler,'' says Chrysler COO Wolfgang Bernhard, explaining the origins of the project that became the Chrysler ME412. It's a mid-engine, quad-turbo V12-powered supercar boasting 850 hp, 850 lb-ft and with ambitions no lower than to out-Enzo Ferrari. That's no mere surprise, it's an ambush.

What could be more unexpected than a mid-engine supercar from Chrysler? How about this statement from none other than division president and CEO Dieter Zetsche: "It's not just a concept. It's a prototype.''

Calm down, he's not promising to build it for sale. Not yet, anyway. He is saying that it's fully engineered-on computers, though the car itself wasn't finished being built at Metalcrafters until Dec. 29-and the company intends to run it this spring to prove it can meet the ambitious performance targets. If a business case exists, Chrysler says it could start building such a machine in about a year.

A business case? Well, yes, they didn't take time to build one before they built the car. No one really knows if the customers who can front up the money for a Ferrari Enzo or Porsche Carrera GT would splash similarly extravagant funds on a car that wears the same badge on its nose as the Town & Country minivan in the next garage bay. The ME412 is being built to supercar standards of material and craftsmanship, however, so it would have to command a similar price. Are there enough customers to warrant the effort?

Well, let's show 'em what they'd get. When the project began, it was a notion shared by Bernhard, Zetsche and design chief Trevor Creed, who came up with it in a meeting after last year's Detroit show. This year's crop of concept cars had already been assigned back in December 2002. The project started out a month late, then. So the development of the thing in only 11 months, coordinating parts suppliers from seven nations and linking them all via computer, was as big a challenge as engineering the car itself. Bernhard-who had ridden the Tomahawk onto the show stage and drove the ME412 this year-had a head start, though. Before joining Chrysler, he was managing director of Mercedes-AMG, where he had acted as the engine supplier for the then-new Pagani Zonda and had personal insight into the development of a supercar, and a few contacts to help get things started. He wasn't the first to wonder what would happen if a major automaker turned its engineering and acquisition resources to the development of a supercar (the Cadillac Cien was a similar exercise), but he was in a position to make things happen. And the key here was to really and truly engineer the car to achieve performance targets that exceed the world's best in production.