St. Tropez, France • It may be a myth that Mercedes’ SL alpha-numeric moniker stands for sport und licht — quite literally sporty and light — but it is a legend the company is finally trying to live up to.
Recent SLs may have been magnificent automobiles, but it’s been a long time — since the 1960s’ SL230/250/280 by my cynical judgment — since “light” and SL fit comfortably in the same sentence. Once the pinnacle of Mercedes’ sporting pretensions, the SL became the very essence of a sports hero gone to seed. Yes, one could still see tell-tale signs of the muscularity underneath, but the overlying layers of fat tended to blunt performance. George Foreman could probably deliver serious whoop-ass to many of the so-called professional heavyweights in boxing today, but his Buddha-like corpulence that we all find so cuddly is a far cry from the Adonis who once prowled rings like a caged cat looking for fresh meat.
Well, Mercedes has finally taken action and put the SL through the automotive equivalent of Foreman’s Lean Mean Spin Frying machine. For cars — especially cars such as the SL, unwilling to give up even a modicum of their sumptuous luxury — that inevitably means a switch to an aluminum chassis. Indeed, the SL’s underlying framework is now entirely aluminum, the switchover letting Mercedes reduce the weight of the body-in-white (essentially the unibody stripped bare of all accoutrement) by 110 kilograms. That’s a lot of performance-enhancing, fuel-consumption-improving, corner-flattening avoirdupois shed (the 2013 SL 63 has dropped 125 kg in all) without sacrificing one iota of hedonism. As such, Mercedes can be forgiven for adopting a boastful “win-win” mantra.
And, like a body builder similarly having to cut up for competition, not only has the SL cut the fat, but it’s bulked up the underlying muscle as well. Gone is the normally aspirated 6.2-litre V8, replaced with the M157 5.5L bi-turbo V8 making its way through all of AMG’s upper-echelon product. Thanks to those twin turbos, there’s now 13 more horsepower (530 in all) and a whopping 125 pound-feet of extra torque.
If Ron Popeil were selling Foreman’s fryer, he’d be yelling, “But, wait, there’s more,” as Mercedes is also offering a performance kit — as if anything boasting 530 hp and 590 lb-ft or torque really needs a performance kit — that sees those figures boosted to a seriously outlandish 557 ponies and 664 lb-ft.
I’m not exactly sure who needs all those pound-feet, but I can tell you that I had a whole bunch of fun playing with them in the hills overlooking France’s summer playground. Indeed, the new SL 63 is a mass of contradictions. On one hand, it howls with an almost NASCAR-like bellow whenever the turbochargers get enthusiastic. On the other, it can purr as sweetly as any Mercedes while cruising St. Tropez’s trendy boulevards. It accelerates as if being chased by the very hounds of Hades (Mercedes claims a zero-to-100-kilometres-an-hour time of 4.2 seconds, but it feels faster — much faster).
The seven-speed MCT transmission shifts so smoothly that butter is no longer an adequate metaphor. In between, it barks through the turbochargers every time the MCT shifts up at 6,000 rpm and glides at 2,000 very silent rpm (well above Canada’s highway speed limits in seventh gear) in equal measure.
If the SL 63’s performance is a huge step forward — it is coupled with a 30% increase in fuel economy as well — then its handling is a revelation. SLs, even the AMG kind, have always been wayward beasts made partially sporting by a copious infusion of controlling electronics. You could always go fast in the car, but there was always a question of who was in control of your trajectory — you or AMG’s electronic nannies.
By contrast, the 2013 edition feels as if the basic chassis has gone on a Charles Atlas program, with the electronics along more in a supervisory capacity. Mercedes’ Active Body Control suspension all but eliminates body roll, the “all but” very important, says Tobias Moers, AMG’s director of vehicle development, because, if the car stayed completely flat during hard cornering, it would feel “synthetic,” with little feedback to the driver.
As is, the SL 63, especially in Sport mode, feels fairly glued to the tarmac, virtually all semblance of Mercedes’ traditional understeer eliminated by the AMG-tuned suspension and revised front steering knuckle, not to mention the AMG-calibrated and adjustable electro-mechanical steering mechanism. Grip from the front P255/35R19 performance radials (there’s P285/35R19s on the rear of the basic SL 63; P285/35R20s on the AMG Performance Studio version I was driving) is so prodigious that even my best efforts at sliding the big Merc were for naught. You’ll run out of bottle before you’ll run out of glue. And the brakes are also up to the task, the 63 coming standard with carbon-ceramic discs and six-piston calipers up front.
Naturally, this being an AMG-enhanced vehicle, there are other big numbers. In the completely revised — and much more luxurious— cabin, there are 900 watts of ear-bleeding Bang & Olufsen audio system sound available should you be willing to pony up the bucks. Speaking of which, the 2013 SL is likely to cost around the same $166,000 the current version commands. It doesn’t sound like much of a bargain from my lowly demographic, but, considering how much the car has improved, there’s far more bang for the buck.
Complaints are few. Styling-wise, the new SL is gorgeous from every angle but straight on; the front end looks just a little too blunt. Blame European safety regulations that protect pedestrians for requiring a greater distance between the hood and the top of the engine to prevent head injury (the hood now acting like a springy air bag). Enhanced safety may be a laudable goal, but there’s no doubt the SL sacrifices some form for this function.
The other niggle is that the SL, especially in 63 guise, may be becoming a little too complicated for the common person. Besides the Comand computer control system, which seems to have no end of submenus, the buttons controlling engine and chassis performance offer too much choice. Besides the multi-position electronic stability program, there’s the adjustable suspension’s controller and the engine/transmission selector, which offers four options — Comfort (which is also an Eco mode, shutting the engine down at stoplights), Sport, Sport+ and Manual. It’s sometimes hard to tell exactly what all this customization does other than alter shift points.
You could just do what I did, which was play with the buttons for five minutes until the novelty wore off and then leave it in Sport mode, revelling in all that horsepower and grip. Lightness may not be its own reward, but it sure does bring with it some truly sporty virtues.
