How to make your neighbours Hellishly green with envy
How to make your neighbours Hellishly green with envy
How to make your neighbours Hellishly green with envy
By Stuart Johnston
The kind of thing I really dig about the Mercedes-AMG GT R is the fact that the driver’s seat is manually-adjustable, and that there is nothing extraneous about this car, from the tip of its front aero-splitter to its rear diffusor, which houses, in part, a genuine titanium exhaust silencer.
That titanium silencer saves weight, as does the transmission tube between the engine and the rear-mounted transmission, which apparently knocks off about 40 per cent of weight, over the standard aluminium item used in the “cooking” GT version. That’s the ticket for the R. Nothing is there just for show, even if it does look gloriously beautiful.
Low weight, lower lap times
The roof too, is made out of carbon, while many of the suspension components are now made of much lighter aluminium, in the interests of less un-sprung weight. Any race-car engineer knows that weight is the enemy in terms of accelerating, stopping and generating grip around corners. And this AMG car was genuinely engineered at the Nürburgring “Nordschleife”, the north loop, or old circuit, known colloquially as “The Green Hell.”
The AMG GT R currently holds the Nordschleife record for rear-wheel-drive sports cars at a time of 7:10.9, and in so-doing put to bed some serious competition from the likes of Porsche with its 911 GT3, Ferrari with its 488 GTB, and other names like Pagani’s Zonda.
That colour….
Appropriately, the car I am sitting in at the new Kyalami is painted in a colour called “AMG Green Hell Magno”. This is the colour I would choose for the GT R, because every time I looked at it I would be reminded of that Nordschleife lap time.
Given that this car has all sorts of race-track trickery incorporated in its basic spec – including active suspension damping, rear-wheel steering, an electronic differential and no less than nine different traction control settings that the driver can dial in – you expect to it to be somewhat highly-strung, twitchy even. But as you blast out the pits and straight-line the sweep towards the first braking zone, with a strong need to haul the car down from 200 or so to around 80 km/h very quickly, there is…no drama.
Amazingly easy to drive quickly
Twitchy? Not a bit of it. The genius of the AMG tweaking is that, if anything, this car is easier to drive at track speeds than the standard GT model (which in itself is very benign around Kyalami).
The secret here seems to lie in the rear steer. At cornering speeds below 100 km/h the rear wheels turn slightly in the opposite direction as the front. At over 100 km/h, those wheels turn every so slightly in the same direction. So you get a quick easy turn like a supermarket trolley at slow speeds, and mega-stability at high speeds
Also playing a big part in the precision is the re-calibrated steering with its variable ratio rack. The R model simply aims for the apex of the tight left-hander with no hint of front-end wash, switches direction instantly for the next right-hander, ditto for the next left-hander and…..and then it’s time to really bury that loud pedal!
There is 430 kW on tap
In the R you have 430 kW on tap, as well as 700 Nm of torque. That’s 55 kW more than on the standard AMG GT! I am not really sure what traction control level the AMG Driving instruction team dialled it, but suffice to say it squirmed just a tad on an earlier drag-strip-simulation start. Now it just built speed inexorably as the famous Sunset Bend approached.
So powerful are the brakes – carbon ceramic units with multiple-pot callipers all round – that you will feel you have all the time in the world to pick a breaking point and simply dial in the car from a late turn-in point towards the apex, which is blind on entry. It all works out beautifully, and…. man! This car makes you feel like a real-life racing driver!
The grip from those big fat Michelin Pilot Cup tyres is stupendous. On the AMG GT R the tyres are bigger at the rear. That means 1275/35 ZR19s up front, 325/30 ZR20s at the rear. And the fenders – carbon up front and aluminium at the rear – have been flared accordingly, giving the car that purposeful stance. That’s to complement that glorious multi-vane new “shark-tooth” grille, harking back to Merc glory days at the 1952 Pan-Americana road race in Mexico.
Unseen (unless you crawl underneath the car) there are also aerodynamic flaps that create downforce, coming into play in the underside of the car when speeds rise over 80 km/h, and other flaps that close off radiator ducting to smooth airflow until temperatures rise above a certain level. Then those flaps will open up automatically.
Natural and unstressed
But out on the track, everything feels completely natural and unstressed. The AMG GT R simply obeys all your commands. The seven-speed AMG automatic gearbox works beautifully, downshifting at just the right points without even using the paddle shifts. The brakes knock off great chunks of speed without any undue pedal pressure.
For the technically-minded, to gain the huge increase in engine power, the R version uses revised turbos for the 4.0-litre V8, revised compression ratios, different engine mapping, and the special titanium exhaust silencer mentioned before.
From burble to growl to a full-throated roar
Speaking of the exhaust, the noise is wonderful. At idle it is a gruff burble. At mid-revs on mild throttle it is a kind of half-growl, and at full taps it is a lion-hearted roar! Yet, unlike certain other AMG offerings, there doesn’t seem to have been too much effort to over-dramatize the sound. This R model AMG GT is the real deal, so it simply sounds extremely, assuredly powerful, rather than exuberant to the point of rudeness!
I felt the whole lap in the R was wonderful because it was so smooth and predictable, and yet at the same time showed off the massive speed potential of this car. Quite possibly, if I was a real racing driver, capable of taking the car right up to the giddy limits of gravitational forces, I might tell a marginally different story. Maybe it does start taking some real superhuman skill as you approach the ultimate edges of its ability.
For Sundays, track days, any old day
As it is, for the average petrolhead who wants to enjoy the car in real life as well on the occasional track day, it is neither too twitchy nor too mellowed out. I believe that the ace driver that managed to run that record time at the Green Hell last December could probably have kept churning in those sorts of times all day, because that’s the way the car feels.
There’s plenty I haven’t mentioned about the Mercedes-AMG GT R, but I’ve told you about the stuff that is important to me. I also haven’t touched on the other newcomer to the range, the new AMG GT C Roadster (this car has also been given a power boost to 410 kW, by the way, and also has plenty of updated hardware). This open-topped car was also launched at Kyalami on Thursday, August 31, and it is no slouch either in the go or handling department! But that’s for another time to explore fully.
Throw me the money
The price of this AMG GT R is R2 689 900, so it’s not exactly aimed at the financially-challenged sector of the car-buying public. Funnily enough, because it is so accomplished in a real-world, rather than add-on manner, I think this car is actually quite a bargain at this price. When you consider you can spend about R2,7-million on a Porsche 911 GT3 and over R4-million on a Ferrari California (which has similar power and speed ratings as the Merc), well, the AMG GT R is definitely not overpriced.
It is quite something to realise how far Mercedes-AMG has come in the past decade, in producing hard-core sports cars, rather than the over-powered GT cruisers they built not so long ago. An interesting fact we learned at launch time was that Mercedes-AMG had already delivered three of these cars to South African customers, and that it seems all of them are using them as daily-drivers!
It gives a whole new meaning to the art of fast and easy shopping. Zero to 100 km/h in 3,6 seconds, a top speed of 318 km/h, then pop over to the supermarket, with luggage space big enough to hold enough beer, chops and charcoal, or sushi and salad-makings to make your neighbours green with envy.
A superb cocktail of a car
Come to think of it, “Green Hell Magno” sounds like a particularly enticing kind of dish you could whip up for your covetous peers. There again it could be a catchy name for a potent cocktail, or a jazzy piece of after-dinner music to really mellow the mood out.
Take your pick, because when it comes to appropriate analogies, the Mercedes-Benz AMG GT R seems to have just about all the bases covered.