First Ride
A ride-along is the equivalent of a tepid handshake climaxing a hot date. Compared with actually driving a brilliant car, a ride-along evaporates from memory quicker than spit on a hot exhaust pipe. One notable exception is a Mercedes-Benz event I attended about 40 years ago. That triple-header experience involved a spectacular sports car piloted by an illustrious driver around a heart-attack track.
My chauffeur was Rudolf Uhlenhaut, the Fangio-fast Mercedes engineer who drew the Silver Arrow racers’ bow strings immediately before and a decade after World War II; to cap his career, Uhlenhaut designed the 300SL Gullwing sports car.
Wankeling the Wall of Death
Our joy ride that day was another winged wonder—a mustard-colored Mercedes C111 coupe powered by a four-rotor Wankel engine. The venue, aptly nicknamed the wall of death, was a test track adjacent to Mercedes’ Untertürkheim manufacturing plant. Faced with insufficient land to create a suitable straightaway, some courageous architect proposed a turnaround loop banked at 90 degrees to effectively double the track’s length.
Uhlenhaut guided us on a couple of unforgettable laps with the calm assurance of a mother wheeling a baby stroller. When the C111 spiraled into the curve, its windshield filled with a wall of concrete. This gullwing’s rotary engine was naturally smooth without a flywheel; throttle response was so spontaneous, the tach needle couldn’t keep up with the whirring rotors. Its shrill wail sounded like a lion homing in on a kill.
Those vivid details sprang to mind when I recently scored another passenger-seat date with Mercedes. Tobias Moers, the recently promoted head of AMG, offered me a ride in the 2016 GT S sports car that was built on a pilot line months ahead of regular production. AMG’s role is spinning Mercedes’ silver star like a roulette wheel to land customers who crave the latest strides in driving emotion. I was here to find out if AMG could top the experimental C111 in my mental scrapbook.
Under the Camouflage
The new GT, and the higher-output GT S variant, offer lessons learned from the McLaren SLR and Mercedes AMG SLS to buyers with less than a fortune to spend. Prices haven’t been divulged, but expect this double-edged sword to attack the high end of the Porsche 911 range, between $115,000 and $150,000.
Before hitting local roads surrounding AMG’s engineering warren in Affalterbach, Germany, Moers provided a guided tour of his camouflaged test car. Under coercion, he revealed that the GT carries over the SLS’s floor, A- and B-pillars, doorsills, front suspension, and Getrag seven-speed dual-clutch automatic transaxle. Snipping two inches from the wheelbase and nearly three inches from the nose trims overall length to just under 180 inches. Overall width is the same as that of the SLS, but the roof is raised and the seats are mounted lower to provide enough headroom for tall drivers wearing helmets. New components in the GT are the engine, the rear suspension, and a cast magnesium member that reinforces the front of the space frame. The tidier dimensions, combined with weight-saving measures such as a lithium-ion battery, drop 175 pounds from the SLS. Our estimate is 3600 pounds ready for the road.
Snorts, Barks, and Modulated Melody
When Moers pokes the start button, it’s clear that untold effort has been invested in reassembling the GT S’s exhaust beat, which is chopped to smithereens by twin BorgWarner turbos. There’s a raucous but refined bass rumble that drops several decibels when muffler valves close a second or two after startup in the interest of neighborly decorum.
