08 Feb 07
The brakes, as before, have a progression problem too. The pedal has a long, springy travel, all of which does something, but only at the end do you reach a solid feel underfoot, at which point the brakes bite vehemently. There's no finesse, no modulation-informing feedback.
Show the 722 a roundabout, though, or a known bend with lots of space for errors, and you can have a fabulously powersliding time if you switch the ESP off. All that torque and power, and it just can't help itself. Doing a throttle-blip as you downshift in quickest-shift mode is fun, too; not many automatic-based transmissions let you do this, but this one does and the little burst of supercharger whine sounds fantastic.
Really, though, the 722 is just too aggressive and unbalanced in its dynamics, and I'm not sure that the SLR's well-heeled customers had quite this in mind when they asked for some extra sportiness. My hunch is that easing off those rear dampers would both get rid of the pogo-bounce and tame the tetchy steering, but I'm probably wrong.
The next item on the SLR agenda, helping it towards the 3,500-unit, 10-year production run that will make it the most-replicated car ever to have an all-carbonfibre structure, will be a roadster to be revealed in the summer. Maybe that will have a better balance of attributes. Somewhere in the SLR's genes is a fabulous supercar, but it hasn't appeared quite yet.
