I recently went to a mate’s bachelor’s party. Well it was more a bachelor’s weekend. It wasn’t the “traditional” rubbish either. So it didn’t end up with someone on the brink of an alcohol induced coma being handcuffed naked and dragged behind a taxi around the town centre with a garden gnome sticking out of his bottom and a pint glass plastered onto his drinking arm. Instead twelve of us who’ve known each other for far too long headed off to a campsite next to the Tugela River with more beer than is sensible. I arrived on the Saturday morning having been on a launch the night before and was confronted by a still drunk Andy (the bachelor) who promptly wrestled me into the river wearing what can only be described as a “Mantard”.
By Gavin Williams
It started life as something rowers wear apparently, midway between a weightlifters get-up and a cycling vest. But on Andy’s considerable girth it was transformed into something else entirely. Something you’d expect to find next to you on a man in a steam room on Bucharest’s “grittier” side. But my point is that I christened it a “Mantard” (an un-clever yet satisfactory combination of Man and Leotard) and that is why I love the English language. We have so much scope of expression and combining words is one of its most consummate joys.
I then heard the word Overrun. Might sound like something involving 5 days of County cricket or a faulty toilet, but it is something altogether more grandiose, more powerful than anything I’ve heard. Especially when you hear what it is from the back of the most exciting car I’ve ever driven: The Mercedes-Benz SL63 AMG. Overrun is what you hear when you’re gunning the big normally aspirated Merc into a corner and the engine management system predicts how much fuel you’ll need to continue at that pace. A bit like the exact opposite of what Eskom does. Then when you stand on the brakes there’s all this left over fuel that is no longer required so it simply gets dumped onto the exhaust and the ensuing crackling sound as the fuel burns is the satisfactorily bestial sound I’ve heard since Black Francis screamed “IN HEAVEN! EVERYTHING IS FINE!!” on “Heaven (The Lady In The Radiator Song)”.
And somewhere a bearded man in strops far out on a Green Peace boat suddenly has this feeling deep in his soul that somewhere, something is very wrong in the world. Your right foot pushes up the oil price quicker than a drunk Texan.
In this day and age of creeping blandness, and faux niceness the SL63 is the antichrist. It is the opposite of everything that is acceptable (read mind-numbing) in this day and age. Looking at it, there’s so much purpose about it. It seems to pulse and flex just standing there with those flared nostrils like a man in a Mantard about to step into a cage in an illegal underground full-contact-sport-you’ve-never-heard-of tournament.
I have always loved Mercs and throughout the 80s growing up I always secretly wished they were a little more brutish, a little more exciting and not just luxurious and svelte. It was exactly like Manchester United who were pretty rubbish when I supported them from birth. Liverpool was the BMW team. Flash, fast and winning over every near-sighted schoolboy’s heart. Then in the 90s things started changing and both my childhood wishes were inexplicably granted. Manchester United started cleaning up everything and Mercedes’ started getting exciting as they brought AMG on board as their Bonkers Division GmBh. Every AMG Merc subsequently has been more exciting, more thrilling and further away from the staidness of the 80s. And yet they remained true to Mercedes’ essence, much like United stayed true to their history and methodology of flowing attacking youthful football. They (Merc not Man U) even returned to F1 albeit with those unfunny bastards at McLaren. But that’s another story.
Starting up the V8 and giving it a childish rev kick is such a thrilling event you could never get tired of it. Like Scalextrics or watching people fall off things. It sounds like a stricken Spitfire on a hell-dive into hell. When it finally pushes all that torque onto the road it’s like being catapulted out of a leather lined cannon. I have a friend who is a staunch old-school punk who only has time for motorbikes and dismisses most cars as sterile pieces of consumerist crap. He got in and I told him to look at the end of his road and then floored it. The sheer physics of the car automatically punches the part of your genetic make-up that makes you laugh uncontrollably. It’s that back of Maths class laugh. The next thing we were at the end of the road and he wanted one. The wonderful thing about the thing is that the soundtrack backs up its capabilities. It sounds like that because that’s the only way you make something go this fast.
And then there’s the overrun. Like stuttered machine gun fire in an empty gymnasium it echoes and bounces off suburban walls causing God-fearing people to genuflect at the End Of Days, old women to recall the Blitz and children to misbehave inexplicably.
After a few days with the car I took a walk up the old closed off road along Table Mountain leaving the SL63 down at the closed off section. On the way back after a daft swim in an icy pond there were all manner of bicyclists, joggers and disgruntled bypass victims being forced to walk by their wives. It gets busy up there at sunset and there I was in a stupid floppy hat, looking my age and getting into a R1.7 million car.
A moment of panic overtook me as people stared. I couldn’t get the thing to start and then after what seemed like days I finally pulled off with the handbrake on. This is what all of those joggelists were thinking. Those two unkempt youths went up that mountain, knifed a German and are now nicking his car. I drove back to my mercifully close house thinking I was by now a hunted man. The cars presence had tested me and I had failed dismally. But beneath all of its mentalist bravado it is still a Merc. The steering wheel is still on the large side and driven normally I could be on holiday in my dad’s old 230E. It’s just poised and graceful but has a sledgehammer in its Vuitton valise and I like that.
The SL63 is everything that I’d hoped it’d be. Outrageously quick and brutal, yet similarly quiet and reserved. It eclipsed the R8 as the most thrilling car I’ve driven marginally merely because of the soundtrack and the drama and the fact that it’s everything I wanted from Mercedes as a kid and it made me feel like I was 10 again.
Downsides? My house keys slipped under the seats one night and while searching for them I got to see all of the exposed wires and what not beneath the ridiculously advanced pulsating seats. It looked like the wiring of the Millennium Falcon and I half expected Chewbacca to be banging away at them with a wrench in a vain attempt to reach warp speed. But like Han Solos craft it does reach warp speed and doesn’t matter how untidy it might be underneath that cool exterior. That, and the fact that my mate and I agreed they should get a different sound for the indicator. It’s too tinny. Should be something deeper and purer. Maybe get Hans-Fritz from the engine department to have a look at it.
I need one of these cars in my life.
Tags: amg, joggers, merc, mercedes benz, SL63
