14 Oct 04
There is one profoundly funny thing about the new Mercedes-Benz CLK DTM AMG and we'll have to get it out of the way now before we can move onto the more serious stuff. I'll leave aside the merely chucklesome fact that its name suggests some highly decorated combat career and bring you straight to its top speed. This Mercedes will do 199mph. You may now be wondering why you're not even giggling: as such figures go it's pretty impressive but funny it ain't. Not, at least, until you discover that this is the speed to which it is electronically restricted.
I suspect Mercedes may struggle to win any awards with its latest example of good corporate citizenship. I don't know what this insane CLK's top speed would otherwise be, but even if it's 220mph - which is entirely plausible - it's hard to imagine the thought process that brought Mercedes to conclude that 199mph is an acceptable speed for a car to be allowed to travel on the public road but that, say, 201mph, was not. In fact I am strongly suspicious that there's an ulterior motive at work here, more of which in a moment.
For now, though, let's just bask in a few more glorious figures before going for a drive. Just 100 of these CLKs will be built, and every last one of them has already been sold for €203,500 before local taxes. It exists to celebrate Mercedes' triumph in the 2003 DTM championship, a sort of deranged German BTCC and, for my money, the best thing that's been on the telly this summer.
