www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7wi3wEQYdo

This is just too good! Nothing can prepare you for the cheesy-ness of this Mercedes advert. What you’re about to watch is a well-shot farce. Schumacher, a stunning new Gullwing SLS, a tunnel and a mean Germanic exhaust note. Enzo must be cursing from on-high. The optimist in me hopes the director asked Schumacher to perform the wink at the end, but the cynical bastard in me still thinks he enjoyed it way too much.

Ciro De Siena

Every now and then a movie comes along which quite simply blows you away. A Dark Knight was that movie for me. It is a masterful arrangement of celluloid; a symphony of action, suspense, emotion and well, explosions really.

Heath Ledger was remarkable as the joker: he personified evil. His polar opposite is obviously our winged hero, in a thankfully less camp batsuit. And representing both sides in one tormented and twisted character: TwoFace. This poor bugger starts of a charming bastion of all that is saintly until someone really pisses him off, creating the most frightening villain imaginable since Anton Chigur in No Country for Old Men.

Click through for the full write up, plus video…

And like Chigur, TwoFace uses a coin to decide his victims’ fate. After all, “in a cruel world, the only morality is chance.”

And that world, in a not too far-fetched way, is world that the Mercedes Benz SL 63 AMG exists in. A world of relentlessly restrictive safety regulations and emissions requirements. A world where the next manufacturer continuously ups the ante in a seemingly endless horsepower war. Someone, or something, was going to snap eventually. And I think it might be this car, with this engine. What an incredible machine. What a vastly overstated show of power. What a magnificent automobile. But is this car a Dark Knight of Power, or a White Knight of Pleasure?

Driving the SL 63 is a bit like going on a night out with both Batman and The Joker. Someone is going to pick a fight, someone is going to get hurt, and at the end of it all someone will go to jail. It’s all fun and games until someone loses their liberty.

The thing is, to even think about driving this car hard you have to have an appetite for drama. And I don’t mean sitting through season 2 of Grey’s Anatomy with your girlfriend. This is more like enjoying a picnic in Baghdad. Outside of the Green Zone.

And its all controlled by the pedal under your right foot. Flooring the accelerator in the SL 63 unleashes a torrent of power and fury with which the rear tyres simply cannot cope. From standstill, nailing the throttle only serves to create an unsettling roar from the exhausts and painful squeals from the tyres. The back end kicks violently as the whole rear of the car fishtails from side to side.

In the blink of an eye the engine, gearbox and traction control systems have held a hearing, and it has been decided that first gear is simply a waste of time and second gear is dispatched to try and sort out the mess.

Second gear engages with a raw mechanical thud and the engine dumps fuel into the exhaust. Suburban-peace-threatening explosions blast from the rear and finally the car is off the mark. Exactly 4 seconds later the needle has skipped over 100km/h and your frightened passenger is fighting to obtain some oxygen. The exhaust note climbs higher and higher, never losing that bass-driven rumble, merely cranking up the volume.

A few seconds later and 200km/h is approaching. This car reaches 200km/h faster than most cars will get to 100. There is merciless power from the engine bay as all 383kW and 720 torques eat through the expensive Michelins. Unlimited, this car will run to well over 300km/h but, in the interests of safety (and avoiding the inside of Pollsmoor) I backed off and settled down to a (relatively) sedate cruise.

Even cruising at 120km/h, a firm kick of the throttle and the whole car squats and leaps forward. The sheer scale of this car’s power reserves is absurd.

The drama of this car is unreal. This is a furious, violent and angry machine; hellbent on scaring it’s occupants and everyone around it half to death. I’ve never sampled a machine so monstrously overpowered, yet so deliciously powerful. And then I discovered the AMG button.

Sitting quietly next to the gearshift is a little black button with the letters AMG in white. Press that button and the car flares its nostrils. The gearbox holds a higher gear and the computer wizards work harder to get you off the line cleanly. The suspension squats and tightens and the whole car comes alive between your fingers. If you thought this car was menacing before, with that button depressed, it simply becomes mechanized evil. A Dark Knight indeed.

Or is it?

The following morning, the sun came out and the fair Cape was very fair indeed. I found myself on the coastal road to Hout Bay. The Harmon Kardon sound system was consummately chanting to the tunes of The Arcade Fire, one of my favourite bands. The multifunction seat was gently massaging my lumbar region. There was a bit of a chill in the air, so I had the seat-warmer on medium and the AirScarf on high, gently whisping warm air against the back of my neck.

I had electronically stowed the roof and I had electronically lifted the wind deflector. I had instructed the centre console to direct a warm breeze over my fingers on the steering wheel and warmer breeze over my toes in the footwell. I had 2 suitcases in the boot which I was delivering to my family and on the passenger seat I had a very comfortable, and very asleep, girlfriend.

All of the above happened in the same car, on the same weekend. How on earth have human engineers achieved this? A car so complete that it can be all things at all times. A car that oozes luxury and character. A car with a useable boot and a folding metal roof. A car that will heat your backside and massage your back, all the while cruising at indecent speeds. A car that will never hit the car in front thanks to ingenious radar-guided cruise control. And car that, when it needs to, will haul all two tonnes of its recycled-Panzerwagon-steel weight around a track in the same time as an Audi R8.

It’s all down to that long, thin, beautifully crafted accelerator pedal. When you use that pedal, you flip the coin. Fortunately though, the boffins at Mercedes Benz have given you a bit more control over how that coin lands.

Ease onto the power and the car is that White Knight: safe, comfortable, beautiful. A shining example of what cars can be, and what cars will be in the years to come.

But stand on that pedal and you place your fate in the hands of an absurdly powerful engine. It becomes the Dark Knight. This car has the power to burn its tyres until they explode. It has the power to reach 140km/h before the next traffic light. It has more power than anyone should ever need or want from a motorcar. And to be honest, I don’t know how anyone could not be corrupted by that.

Thank goodness then, for traction control.

Ciro De Siena

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1N6w8xs1858

There’s a famous VW ad from the 60s which asked, “Ever wondered how the guy who drives the snow plough, gets to the snowplough?”.  Well if you’ve ever wondered how the guy who owns the snowplough company gets to the snowplough company, Mercedes-Benz has the answer: The S 65 AMG L-spec.

It proves the Germans have a sense of humour after all.  They’ve handed their svelte, distinguished flagship S-Class over to their dark arts division, AMG, and the result is the most powerful series saloon ever built.

It produces more torque than a gaggle of secretaries trapped in a lift.  1000 Newton metres of it to be precise. And here’s the kicker. It’s electronically limited to 1000Nm.  Newton certainly never expected his name to be associated with this sort of vulgarity.

Let’s start with the looks though.  We had more than week of the most perfect sunshine until this sidled into my driveway. Suddenly there were menacing grey clouds above as if it had scheduled doomsday to arrive just after lunch.  The big S in ‘iridium silver’ just looks better under brutish brooding skies, and it seems to know that.  I’m sure this amount of power can control the weather. And that sort of power is simply intoxicating.  An engine this good and this relentless doesn’t seem possible.  It’s almost alien as it staggers your senses with a whispered whoosh.  It’s like that ghost army that sweeps through the forces of darkness at the end of Lord Of The Rings.

Ah, the front seats. Immeasurably comfortable and offers relentless massages.

This car has to straddle the two worlds between luxury saloon and madman- with-a-gun-in-a-belltower performance.  So it has a few visual clues to separate it from its more sedate brethren.  Look at the front.  Have you ever seen a powerful businessman fly into a frothing rage?  Not in a hammy Alan Sugar way, but in a real life (shouting down phone) “I’m going to turn France into a f****n parking lot” kind of way.  That’s what the front of this looks like. It’s angry. Very angry.

This is the S 65 L-spec, which could stand for Luxury, Limousine, Limited or Large as Luxembourg.  The car is massive, and as a result my 6ft 4 frame fits comfortably in the back where I can keep an eye on the Nasdaq and fire people at the same time via the complimentary cordless phone and two televisions.  There’s also a bar fridge and remote controls for things like the blinds to keep the sun off your expensive indoor tan.

L-Spec means an extra foot of legroom. So these rear seats recline. They also massage, heat up, cool down, have access to a fridge, a TV each, wireless headphones and a telephone.

Hauling this two tonnne-plus leviathan along is a handbuilt V12 Biturbo producing 450kW. AMG have a one man one engine policy which sounds very Trotskyish, but is in fact rather liberating considering it gets you to 100km/h in 4.8 seconds.

Inside simplicity is the order of the day spoiled slightly by a German “sock and sandal-ness” that sometimes creeps in.  The AMG clock in the centre is just tacky considering the people who own these cars have watches worth more than a block of holiday flats. And the silver lining along the burrwood just seems out of place.

They’re small complaints on a car that is always the benchmark of safety and innovation. It can make you see better at night, stop on its own and make a confident bound to the private airstrip if the coup d’etat doesn’t go quite as planned.  In the world of performance luxury motoring, it stands alone.

Gavin Williams

The drunken, knife wielding grandfather of the S 65.

Being hurtled towards anything in its way last week in the S 65 AMG Merc, I began to think about when exactly Hans-Werner, Erhard and their troubled friends started to loosen their grip on reality.  When exactly was a Mercedes purr turned into a gurgling lunatic howl?  Growing up I just had to accept that Mercedes-Benz would always be scoffed at for their overly large steering wheels and wallowy Church going suspension systems.

A part of me wished that there was a Mercedes that would just show up looking all Merc like and smash the idiotic grins off BMW fans and their “ultimate driving machines”.  Do some damage to their kidney’s grills with 100 Proof automotive moonshine. Something cooked up and cooked out illegally.  Apparently Hans-Werner Aufrecht and Erhard Melcher had that exact same idea. Way back in the 70s, when slipping in and out of reality was part of the daily grind.  Perhaps we have Erich Waxenberger to thank initially for squeezing a 6.3l (from the Merc 600 Limousine) engine into the S-Class of the time; the 300SEL.  The result was mind-bendingly fast for a luxury saloon and upped the stakes in a class Mercedes would never relinquish. Enter AMG who thought it would be prudent to paint it red and go racing.  The result was what was (affectionately, for Germans I guess) nicknamed the “Red Sow”.  Apparently it finished second at the Spa 24 hours in 1971 because it had to keep stopping for fuel and tyres.  Just look at the thing.  I absolutely love it even down to the Camel Filters sponsorship around the race number on the door.  It’s the only Merc I’ve ever liked in red as well.

Today AMG is officially the racing and tuning division of Mercedes-Benz.  Where I’m from a “tuning division” is a group of Lebs outside News Cafe just before last rounds are called.  More on the stupendously awesome S 65 later on this week.

-Gavin Williams

Bringing back the past is always risky. Volkswagen achieved about three days of glory with the reborn Beetle. Ford has generated billions with their gamble on the new Mustang, and Fiat has achieved similar bank-busting success with the 500.

But the SLS was always going to be different. Built from the ground up by AMG, this is not a SL63 AMG in drag. This is all new; and the nostalgia is almost as powerful as the 386kW V8.

Click through for a full gallery.

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.