Mercedes-Benz C63 AMG Black Series 2011 Review - International

Name: Mercedes-Benz C63 AMG Black Series 2011 Review - International
Brand: Mercedes-Benz

Hands up who doesn't like huge engines stuffed into small cars? Go to the back of the room and hang your heads in shame...

Mercedes-Benz C63 AMG Black Series: First Drive
Monterey, USA?

What we liked?
>>

So, so fast
>> Sounds like a NASCAR?
>> Keeps C-Coupe’s handling?

Not so much
>>

Can spot the extra weight over the front end
>> Not the sharpest traction control

There has never been a more powerful C-Class Mercedes-Benz production car than this one… And it’s arguable if even Benz’s DTM racer is rowdier.

The Mercedes-Benz C63 AMG Black Edition's engine is a development of the 6.2-litre V8 from the mighty SLS and, indeed, falls just 50hp short of AMG’s undisputed team captain.

There are forged pistons and conrods and it even pinches the SLS’s lightweight crankshaft to crunch out 380kW of power and 620Nm of torque. AMG claims it will thump, bellow and howl its way to 100km/h in 4.2 seconds, but that’s not the whole story. There are optional, stickier Dunlop tyres that will drop that sprint back to 3.9 seconds, with the Black Series’ traction control battling hard to keep the rear-drive coupe in a straight line almost the whole way.

There isn’t, AMG claims, a cost-effective double-clutch gearbox available to it that will cope with the C63 Black’s torque, so it uses yet another version of the seven-speed Benz automatic, tweaked for more strength and with the faster, harder-shifting clutch pack attached to the front (in lieu of a torque converter). After all of that, it borrows the diff and driveshafts from the meaty E63 to cope with all that twisting.

The Black Series AMGs have always been something to behold, because even if they haven’t always been wonderful cars, they’ve always been fast and, both visually and audibly, bloody loud! This is probably the first one that’s also been designed to be fast, loud and friendly.

If you don’t like the way it’s handling, you’ve got adjustable shock absorbers and you can fiddle away to your heart’s content. Benz suggests the middle, as-delivered setup is the best compromise in most situations, even though all four corners give the option of six clicks of compression and six clicks of rebound damping. That is enough to allow you to change the damper’s behaviour by “at least 50 per cent” according to AMG board member Tobias Moers. You can also drop the ride height.

AMG has, oddly, eschewed carbon-ceramic brakes for it, even though it’s expected to spend much of its life on the track. They’re not even optional. They are, however, clever enough to chip in with torque vectoring to steer out of trouble.

That’s not all, though, because you can add a Track and/or an Aero pack to the car. The former provides the abovementioned grippier rubber and a transmission cooler, while the aero pack chips in with the adjustable rear wing, a bigger front splitter and little carbon-fibre flick-ups on the front corners. Note: the rear wing’s drag pulls the top end down a touch from the stocker’s 300km/h top speed.

Even on its recommended settings ins standard form, the car’s not bad, posting a 7:40 lap time on the Nurburgring’s Nordschleife with former DTM king, Bernd Schneider at the wheel.

The same man’s our guide around California’s famed Laguna Seca circuit as well, and he’s still blessed with ruthless speed and a quirky sense of humour. He’s the Mark Skaife of the DTM, but with a normal nose [Ed: and a sense of humour].

The carbon buckets are a tight fit - and need to be - but while it’s only a two-seater, AMG can add a pair of rear seats if you ask nicely.

Like the C63 Coupe, it offers the driver the switchable choice of Comfort, Sport, Sport+ and Manual for the transmission settings on a big knob that also controls the Race Start setup. There’s also the ESP button providing on, in-between and off and between them, there’s the car’s character defined as you want it.

This is a hot rod, not a luxury machine, and even its Comfort mode it is loud and angry. Fire it up in the pitlane and the machine spits and barks before settling in for a lumpy idle. But nobody is going to drive this car in Comfort, ever, because it does nothing to the suspension. Instead, the switch controls the tranny, the throttle sensitivity and the traction control’s sensitivity.

Sports is as comfy as you’d want the car, but even that is pretty liberal about exercising its vocal cords. It opens up the flap in the exhaust and its bark is suddenly almost painfully loud. The crackle on overrun is unmistakable and every whip up the tacho dial is a savage, deep, unforgiving roar.

But Schneider insists Sport+ is our code for Laguna Seca and promptly squats his SLS lead car’s tail into the pitlane with no regard for any protocol or speed limit.

The C63 Black Series sets off in pursuit in a blaze of tyre smoke, with the deep, rumbling bellow of its V8 blistering the painted pit walls. And, even uphill, the little C-Class is brutal in its delivery of speed. Subtle, it ain’t, and its every delivery system is geared up with a baseball bat.

Sound, sight, speed delivery, gearshift, braking... None of it is engineered to work in the margins. It’s all in-your-face, deal-with-me-if-you-can stuff and it’s not for the shy.

In this mode, the C Black's shifting gears in about 100 milliseconds with a slamming, metallic crack that runs along the driveline and shudders through the cabin, And then, an instant later the engine note takes over the sensory overload duties again, snarling and becoming higher in its pitch until you need to throw out the anchor.

The odd thing about Laguna Seca is while it’s most famous for its corkscrew, that’s not the track's most intimidating corner. The most difficult to get right, for sure, but not the most intimidating… That honour goes to the blind, bent, flat-out crest on the front straight and, on its first flying lap, the C63 Black Series is already pulling almost 200km/h as it bellows its way under the pedestrian bridge. And, though you can’t see it, somewhere over t-h-e-r-e the road kinks left.

Lift off the throttle here and, in this car, they’ll pick apart your cowardice in Canada. Stay on the throttle -- not an insignificant achievement on its own -- and you’ll be diving for the brake pedal around the '4' marker, though whether it’s shorthand for hundreds of metres, yards or feet is beyond me. It’s too busy in the Black Series to figure out which.

Yet there’s none of the squirming, wriggling, panicked retardation you’d expect of a downhill, off-camber braking zone. The Black Series diff runs about 50 per cent lock-up on deceleration and it imbues the chassis with huge braking security that encourages you to go deeper and harder on the pedal. And, a cast iron/aluminium hat combo it might be, but we smashed the brake pedal for three batches of six laps without any reduction in effectiveness (though the pedal height dropped a bit on the short squirts after big stops, such as Turn Two).

While you’re always conscious of a big lump of metal over the front end, the Black Series has retained the astonishing user-friendliness of the C-Class Coupe. The front end can be absolutely crushed into the tarmac under braking, but then you only have to give it back a touch of front spring for it reacquire its enthusiasm for turning in.

And it’s phenomenally adjustable. You can brake it into the apex, gently rolling out of the pedal the whole time before squeezing on the throttle, or you can get it all done in a straight line before mashing the gas. It’s happy enough to play either way and, depending on the track, a combination of both methods will be the quickest way.

There’s more than enough steering feel to make this one of the most adjustable mid-corner rear-drivers going around and the front end will bite with more than a full 1g of lateral acceleration on its 19-inch, nine inch wide forged alloy front wheels.

The front end of the car is a full 28mm wider each side than the C63 AMG and the back end is 42mm wider per side for even greater mid-corner grip in situations just like this.

In the faster corners, the big optional wing eliminates lift (front lift is halved) and you can mash the throttle hard, early, to get out of them again. It also helps you to get into the brake pedal harder, earlier, too.

This car, Moers admits, will spend most of its life on track days, but even its stickiest rubber option is road legal. It is an eminently crashable car, largely because it encourages you to switch off the stability control and let it all slide.

Around here, it all comes together predictably, brutally and quickly, but that’s not to imply it’s a one-trick, straight-line pony. It’s smarter than that, and we saw 1.36g laterally on Laguna’s banked left hander after The Corkscrew.

Surprisingly, it’s almost as fast in Sport+, with the transmission left in auto mode, as it is when you drive it as a manual. It’s a lot easier to drive that way, too. Laguna is a place that demands a fair bit of mid-corner shifting, which can become tiresome if you’re constantly correcting slides (or, indeed, provoking them) and changing gear at the same time.

But as good as the chassis is, it’s always dominated by that thumping engine. It’s flexible enough to pull out of bends at 4000 revs yet it’s willing enough to rip out beyond 7000rpm.

Every downshift comes with a sharp, burbling crackle and the engine never finds a rough spot, even if it deals with distance brutally.

The C63 AMG Black Series a superb beast of a thing but don’t ever be fooled into thinking it’s a car. It’s not. It’s an animal. It might be the most easily-tamed, easily utilised Black Series car yet, but it’s still (and will always be) an animal.

Read the latest news and reviews on your mobile, iPhone or PDA at carsales' mobile site…

Mercedes-Benz C63 AMG Black Series 2011 Review - International

Tags