Cornering King - Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG

If the SLS AMG could wear a T-shirt it would suitably state “I’m the car your mother warned you about”

There's a good chance the woman in your life would feel threatened by this menacing looking sports coupe. Probably the same way grandma felt when grandpa drooled over the Mercedes-Benz 300SL Gullwing (1954 – 1957) - a revered road going sports car of their time. It featured fuel injection, had a top whack of 235kph and did a 100 in less than 10 seconds – impressive figures for even today’s cars.
The 300 SL’s design was so fresh and futuristic that even today, half a century on, its spiritual successor – the SLS AMG – can carry strikingly similar design cues – the gaping grille dominated by the three pointed star, the long hood and upright windscreen, the tapered rear and of course the iconic ‘Gullwing’ doors.
The SLS AMG, however, owes its soul to a legendary race car – the W 194 also called the Panamerica Racer (see below).

AMG, based at Affalterbach, is the tuning offshoot of Mercedes-Benz turning out thoroughbred sports car avatars of everyday Mercedes-Benz models. The SLS though is the first car to be completely engineered by AMG.

And that was your concise history and geography lesson - I am now going to tell you what the SLS can do and, bloody hell, does it do it well!!!.

I write this just after a 450km long day out driving the SLS on the twisty Pam American highway in Mexico from Peubla to Oaxaca. My pulse is still racing and I can still hear the engine in my head roaring with unbridled enthusiasm as it down shifts through the seven speed double clutch transmission with the ceramic brakes shaving off some speed as I attack a corner.

Round the apex, off the brakes, on the gas and 563 horses in the crankcase burst into spontaneous gallop as if being ridden by Wagner's Valkyries . More emotions surge through my soul in those five seconds around the curve than I usually experience in a day at the desk. Terror, confidence, joy and exhilaration rapidly sear through me as the SLS urges me to take a corner at an eye-popping pace and then goes around it with the poise and grace of a Bolshoi ballerina doing a pirouette. There is no battle of wills fought through the steering wheel to keep things tidy nor is there a nightmare waiting to happen even when the corner is a double apex one – just oodles of grip and complicity. The dynamics of this car make it scythe through twists and turns - quickly and precisely – thanks to its low centre of gravity and weight distribution - 47 percent at the front and 53 at the rear. At consequent twists on the road, especially between Tehuacan and Asuncion, the SLS inspired me to get off the power late and carry more speed into corners and still it went through without any corrective action from the ESP (Electronic Stability Program). The steering however feels a tad too light at high speeds, especially over road irregularities.

To put aside superlatives and give you figures, AMG claims the SLS will go from 0 to 100kph in just 3.8 seconds and to 200kph in 12 – quite believable because I remember the speedo needle hovering at 200kph ever so often. The peak torque is 650Nm at 4750rpm and of this 420Nm is available right down from 2000rpm.
Inside the car, it feels more aircraft cockpit thanks to its design elements including the gear selector that looks like a joy stick. An array of buttons flank the centre console. With one of these you can choose the driving mode (comfort, sports, sports+ or manual), another lets you choose the ESP mode (normal or sports) and yet another raises the rear fin which anyway automatically pops open when the car exceeds 120kph. The seats, which have magnesium backrests, are thinly padded but hugely adjustable to get that perfect driving posture. The flat bottom steering wheel further enhances the race car feel.
When I started off from Puebla the initial section was a double lane carriage way with road surfaces that were not that great. The suspension handled it well, but its stiff set up meant that a few jarring thuds filtered through. This was also because of the low profile tires. The car is so low that speed breakers in villages had to be taken at walking pace and yet the belly would sometimes scrape.

You can either drive this car letting the auto box do all the gear changing for you or you can use the paddle shifts behind the steering to make the driving more involving and it is when you do the latter that the SLS is sheer thrill and even more joy. On twisty roads this car demands to be driven hard thanks to its huge appetite for corners. Yet, on motorway straights it will happily cruise at 120kph with the engine turning over at 2500 rpm in the seventh gear.
You cannot escape attention with this car. It exhaust announces its arrival, its lines get it plenty of eyeballs and whenever I stopped to take pictures and opened the Gullwing doors, it always drew people to it. Out would come cell-phones to take pictures, some would want to pose with the car and I’d usually be bombarded with questions in Spanish.
The SLS AMG is a very engaging driver’s car and when you buy it – for INR 2 crores and more, base price – what you get is a sports supercar that demands adulation and in turn will give you bags of exhilaration each time you take it on a long drive preferably on a twisty road.

The Opa of the SLS
The Opa (‘grandpa’ in German) of the SLS AMG was the racing sports coupé bearing internal code W 194. It was developed – over just nine months – in 1952 to put Mercedes-Benz back in the high echelons of motor racing.
It is this racing car which was very similar, but not identical, to the 1954 road going Mercedes-Benz 300SL (the W 198), that the creators of the SLS AMG drew inspiration from. The road going 300SL was used as a reference point because it’s a more familiar car. But the W 194 was a racing car and the SLS is closer to a race car.

In 1950 Mercedes-Benz realized that their swift but heavy pre war Silver Arrows (W 154), were past their glory days. So they looked at developing a sporty (read well handling) and light race car. Hence the acronym SL – ‘Sport Leicht’ (Sport Light).
The W 194 featured double wishbone suspension that Mercedes-Benz had pioneered in the ‘30’s and, one of the reasons why the Silver Arrows had dominated the 1937 Grand Prix season.
Using a tubular space frame as a supporting structure made the W 194 light. A space frame allows reducing the amount of metal without sacrificing strength. To look at, it is a filigree latticework of a large number of triangles and to the eye it is more holes than metal but it’s this precise geometric arrangement of metal that absorbs tensile and compression forces. The W 194’s space frame was 20 kilograms lighter than the ladder type frame of the Silver Arrows and yet had the same tautness.
To ensure maximum stability, the space frame reached high up at the sides which made the Gullwing doors a technical necessity which inadvertently contributed to the car’s cult status. When the road legal version, the 300SL, was introduced at the 1954 New York International Motor Sports Show it was already a legend thanks to the prowess of the racing car from which it had been derived.

Finally, why drive the new SLS, developed in Germany, on the Pan-American Highway in Mexico? It was here in November 1952 that a pair of W 194 racing sports coupés, driven by Karl Kling and Hermann Lang, swept to a 1 – 2 victory, respectively, in the 3rd Carrera Panamerica – a 3100 km race across the length of Mexico. The winning car of Karl Kling and co-driver Hans Klenk had even hit a vulture causing the windscreen to shatter, knocking Klenk unconscious and causing him facial injuries, yet they pushed on to win. A third W 194 driven by John Fitch, a World War II ace, would have made it a full podium had he not been disqualified for permitting a mechanic to touch his car on the penultimate day.
It’s a fitting tribute to drive the new SLS AMG ‘Gullwing’ here on this road where its grand-daddy achieved its greatest triumph and reached the pinnacle of its glory.

A Tunnel too Short - Stalag Luft III - Zagan, Poland

Anybody who’s seen The Great Escape will know that it was one of the most audacious escape attempts of the war. Allied airmen dug a 360 foot long tunnel in a bid to escape from Stalag Luft III (Prison Camp for Aviators No. 3) which was a Prisoner of War (POW) camp for Allied Airmen situated in Poland, deep in Nazi Europe

I was in Mlada Boleslav, Czech Republic for two days visiting the Skoda museum there. On the second afternoon while staring at the map and wondering where to take the new Skoda Yeti for a drive I saw that we weren’t too far from the Czech-Polish border. And, I knew Stalag Luft III at Sagan was in West Poland. A quick Google revealed that Sagan (now called Zagan) was just 187km away. Soon the World Wide Web had delivered all the information about the location of Stalag Luft III including geographical coordinates (51° 35′ 55″ N, 15° 18′ 27″ E) which I fed into my Garmin GPS and set off. Along with my camera, my Garmin Nuvi 250 is my constant travel companion, without it I would have never found Zagan as easily as I did. Through motorways, country roads and narrow village streets from the Czech Republic through Germany into Poland, it directed me from Mlada Boleslav right to the doorstep of the little museum in Zagan that stands a kilometre from the location of the old prison camp.
The Germans chose Zagan as a location for a POW camp because it was so deep inside enemy territory. The Baltic Sea was far away and if airmen escaped they’d have to go through hundreds of miles of enemy territory before reaching neutral countries like Switzerland or Sweden. Besides that the soft sand was not conducive to tunnelling.

The little museum is run by locals and makes for an interesting visit showing reel footage and displaying the ingenious tools the prisoners fabricated and a small scale layout of the camp. There is also a replica of the tunnel and visitors can crawl through to get a feel of how it must have been.
The short drive away in the woods behind the village is the location where Stalag Luft III once stood. The Germans destroyed the camp when they abandoned it in the face of the Russian advance and in the 65 years since it has been overgrown by the forest,

but the concrete foundations are still there. A cobblestoned path marks the route of the tunnel nicknamed ‘Harry’ over ground. I walked around the camp and saw the ‘Cooler’ stood. It was here that Steve McQueen was often put into solitary confinement.

The reason that the escape failed was because the exit of tunnel ‘Harry’ that the prisoners had painstakingly dug over a year was short of the tree line of the woods by a few meters.

Today one can stand there and see how little they fell short by. This was the reason why only 76 managed to get out instead of the 250 prisoners as planned. Of these 73 were recaptured and 50 were executed by the Gestapo. Three escaped and 23 were sent back to the camp. Close by near the village cemetery there is a memorial to the 50 who were shot dead. Even today, 66 years later there were fresh flowers on it.