MUSCLE BOUND

The Mercedes-amg GT 63 S 4-Door may hark back to the street rods of the 1960s, but an astonishing range of abilities make it the thoroughly modern hooligan. Jon Wall drives it.

The 1960s and ’70s were the heyday of the muscle car, a genus of automobile developed by American manufacturers for street racing – though, of course, they’d never have admitted anything quite so crazily antisocial at the time. The formula was simple: Take one two-door sedan or coupe, shoehorn into its front end the biggest and most powerful V8 engine in your parts inventory, tart it up with a fancy name and paint job, maybe a floor-mounted gear shifter and definitely a set of alloy wheels, and then place it at the front of your showrooms – usually with a surprisingly affordable price sticker on the windscreen – as a halo car for your brand.

It was a strategy adopted by almost every major US auto brand. At one extreme, the desperately staid American Motors Corporation attempted to add sparkle to a lacklustre image through its Rambler Rebel, which after being force-fed a course of such steroids was unfeasibly badged as “The Machine”; at the other was General Motors’ Pontiac division, whose GTO was for a time regarded as one of the coolest cars in the States, in spite of a name shamelessly misappropriated from a racing Ferrari.

For a few glorious years, muscle cars were huge and then, suddenly, they weren’t. The double whammy of cleanair legislation and rocketing petrol prices after the 1973 oil crisis caused Americans to look seriously at smaller cars for the first time since the 1930s; sales of gas guzzlers dropped off a cliff, while just as quickly car companies jumped off what had been a lucrative bandwagon. As the ’70s turned into the ’80s, misty-eyed car buffs would reminisce about the old street racers, conveniently forgetting the fact that, though fast enough in a straight line, they were generally woeful whenever a corner heaved into sight. Manufacturers even made occasional attempts to revive them, but to all intents and purposes muscle cars as we knew them were dead and buried.

And then in the mid-1990s, along came the Germans, who by now weren’t just building big cars but were also developing large and, by the standards of the 1960s, outrageously powerful engines. Audi’s full-sized S8 sportsluxury saloon of 1995, for example, had a 4.2-litre V8 beneath its bonnet and the second-generation model even boasted a 5.2-litre V10. BMW and Mercedes joined in too, each building V12s as well as a range of V8s – equally formidable firepower with which they could endow their own high-performance hot rods.

In a country with no overall speed limit, the end result wasn’t hard to predict: an arms race soon broke out between the three main German companies, in which engine outputs and speeds began to soar, just as they had across the pond in the 1960s. Rather than resulting in a new breed of muscle car, however, this battle for supremacy on the autobahn ultimately gave birth to what we can correctly regard as its logical successor, the super saloon.

Unlike the stripped-down street rods that teenagers drove to the edge of town to drag race some 50 years ago, the muscle car’s 21st-century equivalent is an infinitely more complex, sophisticated and even versatile beast. Take the Mercedes-amg GT 63 S 4-Door Coupé, whose key just happens to be nestled in my trouser pocket. Formidably powerful, with some 630bhp and an astonishing 900Nm of torque available from its twin-turbocharged 4-litre V8 engine, it’s fast enough in a standing start to keep up with many supercars, and will theoretically max out at 315km/h, even when fully laden with four passengers – who are cossetted in a degree of comfort and opulence that verges on the spectacular.

It’s also brilliantly engineered. Whereas those early American beasts were fairly crude affairs, often bolted together by a small team working semi-independently in some shed at the edge of the factory, the AMG fairly bristles with leading-edge technology, from carbon-ceramic brake discs, four-wheel steering, air suspension and active aerodynamics to 4Matic+ all-wheel drive, nine-speed transmission, variable electromechanical steering, and a super-stiff construction that mixes carbon fibre, aluminium and steel. There’s also a suite of no fewer than six Dynamic Select drive modes that, should you wish it, include the ability to more or less switch off the traction control and hang out the tail. Just the job for the supermarket run.

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4-litre twin-turbocharged V8 Nine-speed automatic 630bhp

900Nm @ 2,500–4,500rpm 315km/h 0–100km/h in 3.2 seconds 2,045kg