Take one Mercedes twin-turbo V8. Give it a stupid, ungodly
amount of power. Take the noise straight out of a Camaro SS. That’s the Mercedes-AMG
GT S, and I think I’m in love with it.
Yes, I know, you might think it’s easy to fall in love with
a car that costs $154,200. For that price, you damn well better be in love with
it, right?
But that actually couldn’t be further from the truth.
Consider the Always and Eternal Lord Of Our Hearts, the Miata, which at just
under 25 grand isn’t exactly going to set a Miami club-goer’s hair on fire.
The more expensive a car tends to be, the more car companies
seem to focus on making them more more. More power. More electronics. More
bells and whistles. More steering modes. More throttle input selections. More
things removing you from the road. More designers trying to make a car look
appealing to everyone, and taking all the drama out of it.
So how do you make a car this expensive, this wild, this
over-the-top, and still make it absolutely great?
I’m still not sure how Mercedes did it, but the Mercedes-AMG
GT S, incredibly dumb name and all, is great.
Greatness, of course, has to be contextualized. The AMG GT,
of course, has got some context, too. Within Mercedes itself, the company’s
made a slew of ridiculous two-seater velocity demons over the past decade or
so, beyond even the normal pinnacle that makes up the AMG nameplate. There was
the SLR, made in conjunction with McLaren, and the SLS, made in conjunction
with itself.
But these were flashy, elongated symbols of success, costing
many hundreds of thousands of dollars and coming complete with absurd,
ridiculous doors that opened up and/or away in various guises. You might buy
one to pair nicely with a Ferrari, but even then, the company never planned to
sell more than a few thousand at most.
Which is fine, for small companies like Ferrari. But
Mercedes is a juggernaut. It can’t just beat Ferrari. It needs to beat Jaguar,
and Porsche, at the coupe-for-around-a-hundred-grand game.
And holy hell, I do think it’s done it.
I didn’t want to like the Mercedes-AMG GT S, for a lot of
reasons. Its name is off-putting, an amalgam of letters that sounds more like a
computer chip serial code than name for a car. I thought it might be an attempt
at a sporty coupe for general-practice doctors from a car company that makes
big and heavy yachts for thoracic surgeons.
With its 503 horsepower and 479 pound-feet of torque coming
from a turbocharged, 4.0-liter V8 engine, it would surely be simultaneously
overpowered but dull to drive in corners, like a shot of non-alcoholic
Jägermeister.
Its exterior, on first look and to those around you, is
entirely reminiscent of male genitalia in a way that screams that you
have some unresolved adequacy issues. The “long-hood-short-deck” combo is
considered the gold standard of grand touring, and yet here, it’s taken to
extremes, with a proboscis stretched out in front like a piece of Laffy Taffy.
But then you look at it from other angles, and everything
somehow starts looking right. The sides are nicely scooped and swooped. The
occupants sit damn near over the rear wheels. That front end, while fully
festooned with air intakes, isn’t cartoonish.
And I started thinking about how wrong I was. Because unlike
with many cars, merely being in the AMG GT’s presence gives a sense of
occasion.
That ridiculous snout is ridiculous with purpose, as the
whole engine sits behind the front axle. It’s low and wide, which helps with
that whole track thing. And, of course, there’s that noise.
Less primal than the scream of the F-Type’s V8, and much
more of a bellow than anything in a 911, it’s more like carrying around an
old-school American eight-pot around with you wherever you go, except that this
muscle car has a button that actually makes things louder.
Plus that button just looks like a twin-barreled cannon
carried around by a demented robot.
And that’s before you even drive it. Folding yourself in
isn’t exactly easy – again, another reminder that this isn’t just some car.
If you’re over 6'2" or so, you might even have a problem fitting. But if
you put your butt down first, then swivel the legs in, you’ve got it.
Foot on the brake, press the ENGINE START/STOP button, make
sure the loud exhaust is in the “on” position, because the quiet setting is
mostly just for unexpected funerals and pre-getaway crime, and then make sure
the parking brake is off.
And then, well, it’s a bit like driving around an enormous
cat that really doesn’t want to be caught napping. The whole thing feels a bit
like it’s straining at the reins at all times, not because it’s unsettled or
unruly, but because it’s capable of so much more than just tooling around in
traffic.
The machine vibrates with life. That monstrous V8—fitted
with the Dynamic Plus Package, as mine was, with a wider peak power band once
you put it into RACE mode—just begs for you to put it into full song. The
seven-speed dual-clutch gear box shifts faster than lightning, with perfect
blips on the overrun adding to the snorts and chortles from the engine, popping
blissfully along as it goes, and the carbon-ceramic brakes, grabby when cold
and at low-speeds serve as a constant reminder:
C’mon. Faster. Let’s go. Push harder. You can do better.
C’mon. Faster.
The steering wheel chatters at you as you go along, letting
you even read the Bott’s Dots on the road like your only muse is the
protagonist of the Princess and the Pea. It’s direct and communicative, and
even though you sit approximately 900 miles from the tip of the car, you still
know at all times what the front of the car is doing.
Even though most of my time was spent on the highway and
crawling along in Miami traffic, it never, ever got unsorted. Hit an odd bump,
and you still know exactly what’s going on. Nothing fazes it, and nothing fazes
you.
And that’s when you realize, sure, it’s got “GT” in the
name. But between all of that pent-up energy, the suspension that’s on the firm
side even in comfort mode, the center-locking wheels on enormous tires, and the
ridiculous looks, it’s not a grand tourer at all. It’s a racer waiting to be
broken free of the shackles that mere mortals conceive of when they think of
roads.
Yeah, I guess it’s got enough black and red leather in there
to make you think you’re in one of Miami’s more interesting nightclubs. And I
guess that, in true GT form, you would definitely be one of the more
interesting people when you show up at one of those more interesting
nightclubs.
But I don’t care. It’s a car that you not only want to
drive, it wants to be driven right back at you. And there’s nothing I could
possibly want more.
source: http://jalopnik.com/the-mercedes-amg-gt-s-is-a-triumph-of-speed-and-style-o-1770307635
by Michel Ballaban
http://www.boscheuropean.com
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