Disconnect inferno
What you see and what you get in the AMG GT 4-Door Coupe are two almost entirely contradictory experiences, like someone’s projecting a strawberry smoothie into your eyes while slipping straight vodka to your taste buds. This is a five-metre-long Mercedes with a luxurious interior, including amazing massage chairs (plus a couple of quality clangers and largely fantastic infotainment let down by a dismal interface), but which drives like a sports car – a taut, aggressive, fang-bearing beast of a sports car.
Let’s be clear, the 4-Door is a fantastic thing to hoon about in like Lewis Hamilton on a quali lap, but it is a bit baing, starting with a name that says four-door but a liftback tailgate that says five, and a body that’s very similar in concept to the existing CLS. The UK no longer gets an AMG V8 option for the CLS, but this hardly counts as proper differentiation.
The AMG starts life with the MRA platform of the E-Class estate, and takes AMG’s excellent twin-turbo 4.0-litre V8 engine and all-wheel drive. But from that shared DNA the two diverge spectacularly when AMG boss Tobias Moers instructs a team already partial to 98RON in the morning to go berserk – the result is carbon for the boot floor and rear bulkhead, dynamic engine mounts, a rigid subframe at the front, forged aluminium suspension components, a ‘shearing plate’ under the engine like you’d normally find to stiffen a wobblier cabrio, and steel reinforcement struts at the rear. All of it makes the AMG stiffer, more responsive; gritting its teeth and tensing its muscles before it moves an inch.
To that rigid base is added full air suspension, rear-wheel steering, standard carbon-ceramic stoppers, active aero and driving modes layered upon driving modes. It costs almost £50k more than an E63 S saloon at £145k in our car’s top 63 S spec. But get this: it’s 83kg portlier, and makes 630bhp and 664lb ft, or just 26bhp and 37lb ft more.
If that sounds underwhelming, there’s no doubting the AMG is shot through with exotic driving dynamics, though its more extreme focus on driver entertainment inevitably makes it a gnarlier daily proposition than either the RS6 or the M5, for good and for bad.
The 4Matic all-wheel-drive binds – unforgivably and uncouthly – in car parks like a hardy off-roader with diffs locked, and rides with an agitated fidget, even in its Comfort setting. It’s not uncomfortable, but it is unflinchingly firm and focused and with the pronounced tyre noise inevitable from a chassis with so little squish. You might notice the ninespeed multi-clutch transmission stumbles and thunks a little in gentle driving in its lowest ratios even in Comfort, but also that its shifts – controlled by gorgeous aluminium paddles when not left to the software’s own devices – are the snappiest here, blamming in Race-mode changes with a precision that makes the RS6 and M5 seem dozy.
There’s no compromise with the variable-rate electro-mechanical steering. It’s the best on test by a margin, with speed and accuracy but also feel through its tactile alcantara-wrapped rim like running your hands over the granulated surface. The 3982cc twin-turbocharged engine is a thing of wonder, like listening to a racing heartbeat through a stethoscope at lower revs and a top end like a terrible accident in a munitions factory, all complemented by very little lag and the promptest throttle response, partly thanks to ball bearings in the two twin-scroll turbochargers, a first for this engine. And it’s viciously quick, relentless in its delivery yet explosively multi-dimensional all at the same time.
What lets you tap all that ability is the 4Matic all-wheel drive, on a par with BMW’s M xDrive as a multi-talented set-up that’s able to claw as much grip from the surface as possible in regular settings, if with a very pronounced rear bias. Plus you can powerslide the AMG much like you can the M5 in the more aggressive modes if it’s wet, and there’s a full rear-drive Drift mode if you press buttons and pull paddles like accessing a computer game cheat mode. Again, not today – just didn’t need to. When I took the AMG home from Wales, it eased me through galeforce wind and standing water on the motorway. And then cross-country, in better weather, it was so intense and pure I had to remind myself I was driving a four- or five-door saloon coupe thing. Body control, the agility gifted this lengthy car by such expertly integrated rear-wheel steering, the fizzy feel and the excitement – all belong to a hardcore sports car. But do people really exist who want a big car so extreme, so focused it feels like it could hound a 911 GT3 RS on a trackday? I’m not sure, and I’m still confused, even if I know this is a truly special car. ⊲
It’s viciously quick, relentless in its delivery yet at the same time explosively multi-dimensional