Merc-AMG A45 S: still bonkers, now better
The smallest AMG is now also one of the best. Immense power and a genius di makes this a riot of a driver’s car
To date, the original Moose Dodger was the best A-Class produced by Mercedes – a sophisticated chunk of sandwich-floored engineering, and something of a Tardis in the accommodation stakes to boot.
Alas, over-deterred by the all too real risk of an unseemly encounter between a permanently nose-bagged, Twiglet-legged quadruped and Mercedes in, say, Macclesfield, the company suddenly decided that ‘A’ no longer stood for smallest car in the range but ‘A Golf Rival’. The result was a bit of a dog even in AMG 45 guise; fast, but displaying all the subtlety and finesse of trout fishing with hand grenades.
By contrast, the second-generation A Golf Rival-Class is really rather good. And in AMG guise – a homage both to the pleasingly brutal AMG GT and the face of the man who sticks his head out of a car window at 150mph and opens his mouth – it’s an instant classic. Not least because, as with ownership of a classic car, you’re destined to grow a beard in a layby while trying to get it to work as you would wish.
Twin 10.25-inch screens presented as a high-gloss pizza chef’s paddle chopped into the dashtop in lieu of a properly cowled instrument binnacle are all very well, and do boast excellent graphics. But they lay the foundations for a software quagmire of Glastonbury-esque platform and content complexity. We must be grateful that you can let your fingers do the walking, and that the mud is merely metaphorical.
Control systems in triplicate may be reassuring aboard an Airbus, but give off a strong whiff of overkill to those flying at ground level. And over and above the inevitable drive mode and undercarriage selection systems, the surfing of screen after screen after screen unearths the endlessly adjustable parameters of myriad Stuff You Didn’t Know You Needed.
Those of us who have no time to spare for glancing at g-force meters and stopwatches when pressing on find it at best a distraction, and, at worst – when the absence of a simple button means menu-surfing merely to disengage the loathsome and steering-corrupting lane-keeping assistant every time you start the car – increasingly irksome. How about one button, simply marked ‘ME’, which you stab to configure everything, and I do mean everything, exactly as it was after you first spent a respectable beard setting every parameter to your satisfaction? Better yet, all could be automatically effected via your own key every time you merely approach the car...
And that’s worth having, because all this titting about simply distracts from the fact that, from a mechanical engineering perspective (remember mechanical engineering, anyone?) the A45 is something of a riot.
The fun starts in the engine bay, with the world’s most powerful four-cylinder turbo in series production. In A45 S guise, 415bhp and 368lb ft have been painstakingly extracted from a transversely-mounted, hand-built 2.0-litre unit, and directed to all four wheels via an eightspeed dual-clutch transmission.
Said power and torque are enough to fling the highly strung hatchback to 62mph in just 3.9 seconds, and on to 167mph. However, even with a suitably sporting drive mode dialled in, there’s precious little torque available below 3000rpm through the gears. Happily, progress thereafter is pleasingly rapid and accompanied by a properly waspish exhaust note and the inevitable din of cold milk hitting giant Rice Krispies on overrun.
The eight-speed, twin-clutch transmission ⊲
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