14 Oct 04
You may have been wondering when those three little letters, S, L and R were going to surface in this story. Surely this little upstart cannot approach the performance level and pure visceral thrill of Merc's McLaren engineered, carbon-fibre uber-car? I wouldn't bet on it. The 626bhp SLR may be a tad more powerful but, with 590lb ft of torque, the CLK has 15lb ft more grunt. Merc's own figures say they're separated by just 0.1sec at 62mph and that even at 125mph, the SLR's advantage is a frankly negligible 0.3sec. Top speed? Well the SLR's downforce-enhancing aerodynamics restrict it to 208mph without the need for electronic intervention and here, I suspect, lies the reason for the CLK's 199mph limiter. Given than an unrestricted SL55, with over 100bhp less than the CLK, is known to do 202mph, it's a fair bet that, left to its own devices, it would be this little known CLK, and not the headline-grabbing and twice as expensive SLR that would be Mercedes' fastest road car. And that would never do.
And, of course, that's only the straight-line story. Here I must confess that while I have been in an SLR on the track, I have only driven it on the road; conversely all my experience of the CLK was at race pace around Paul Ricard, trying to keep up with a three-times Le Mans winner driving another highly modified CLK, this time Bernie's F1 safety car. The man in question is former DTM champion and all-round good guy Klaus Ludwig. Having been the chief development driver for this CLK, no-one is in a better position to say how fast it really is.
He starts well and answers the inevitable question about how fast it will lap the original Nurburgring with seasoned aplomb. It was, he said, a real struggle to circulate the 14-mile northern loop in 8min 30sec. I was slightly puzzled and a mite disappointed: that's front-line supercar performance but, by those standards, not that far out of the ordinary. Then Klaus explains - it was a long distance run and the problem was driving it sufficiently slowly to repeat this preset time. So how fast would it go if he really tried: 'Oh, 7min 45sec, no problem.' And that is something else.
