Of the German car brands, the one manufacturer that has always had the biggest gulf between its ‘regular’ and high-performance derivatives is Mercedes. Despite a huge amount of domestic and international motorsport success, Mercedes high-performance AMG models have always felt more like hotrods rather than vehicles derived from their racing counterparts, apart from perhaps the AMG ONE.
The whole premise of the high-performance Mercedes has always been a bit of a oxymoron. BMWs are blessed with superior inherent dynamics, and Audis make more stable platforms for adding additional speed, but Mercedes performance cars have always felt a little too self-conscious like a sober person trying to dance in a nightclub. Perhaps this disconnect is due to the fact that, originally, AMG was an external tuner before it was amalgamated. Maybe this sense of ‘Mercedes’ and ‘AMG’ still persists hence the lack of a cohesive spirit.
This disparity is highlighted most in the hardcore high performance AMG CLK variants released in the mid-2000s. The first, the CLK AMG DTM was, and is, a bona fide collectors car. 100 coupes and 80 convertibles in total. The CLK AMG DTM was built to celebrate Mercedes victory in the 2003 DTM championship, and again the CLK AMG DTM probably could not have been further detached from the racing car that inspired it. A stonking great 570 bhp supercharged V8 lay under the bonnet, and the 1700 kg+ kerb weight hardly screamed ‘race car’. That being said, the CLK AMG DTM looked the business, all flared-arches and angular body work selling the race car for the road vibe.
But again, it was the CLK AMG DTM’s connection to the existing and dull CLK that let it down. The interior was a mismatch of carbon fibre and a Mercedes interior that was a product made at the height of Mercedes’ obsession with horrible plastics.
The later ultra high-performance CLK was the CLK AMG Black Series. The second Black Series Mercedes, the CLK was a bit more of an engineering exercise. The CLK Black featured a heavily revised chassis, a limited-slip differential, carbon fibre body panels, no back seats, and an ‘if looks could kill’ aesthetic.
Mercedes was a little more generous with the CLK Black Series, making 500. The engine was now that fabled naturally aspirated stager, the M156, boasting 500 bhp and 465 lb ft from its generous 6.2 Litre displacement. To this day, the CLK Black Series is still a spectacularly good looking machine. The blistered arches, deeper front and rear bumpers and then the wheels. Oh man those wheels. Pictures will never do them justice. The CLK Black Series features 19 inch single piece machined wheels that have been polished to within an inch of their lives. The wheels sparkle but somehow manage to sidestep appearing kitsch.
The interior doesn’t fair so well. Again it’s the lame basic architecture of the standard CLK’s interior that lets the CLK Black Series down. All the carbon in the world cannot make up for ugly design and the interior is this kind of confused place. Yes the door cards have this achingly cool machined aluminium insert, and the bucket seats, combined with no back seats give off this tough aesthetic but again it’s the details that hurt. The seats feel like something a buddy track day enthusiast has done in their garage: they simply do not line up with the steering wheel, forcing the drive to sort of twist awkwardly; not the end of the world on a 20 minute blast but probably not the best for a long road trip.
There are some strange design elements too, such as the all-aluminium gear selector. The actual selector lever looks like the throttle from a jet plane that has shrunk it the wash, and the pattern from going from park to trying to select neutral, drive, reverse or automatic seriously looks as if the engineers were just taking the piss. It makes no sense whatsoever. What also adds to this apparent afterthought is that the actual gates themselves are lined with those horrible plastic bristles like the kind you find inside of letterbox flaps.
The best advice for admiring these machines would be to look at them as a whole. Once you start to dig a bit deeper their ordinary underpinnings begin to detract from their specialness.
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