Category: Exotic Sports 
Price Range: £33,411 to £68,923
F1 safety car looks, incredible noise, searing performance, surprisingly useable on the road.
Auto 'box robs some of the driver involvement, pricey.
AMG supercar stuns in its performance and usability.
Along with the adoption of the new suspension, brakes and rear diff, AMG has stripped almost all of the luxurious bits from its slightly less hardcore CLK model. All in the interest of weight saving, of course, but you'd be wrong if you expected the CLK's quality levels to fall.
The Black Series is a carbon-fibre fetishist's dream. Instead of ruffled leather and wood cladding the door panels, there is an exquisite carbon-fibre panel branded with the letters AMG. And instead of a pair of regular powered seats, there are bucket seats covered with FIA-approved flame-resistant material. It feels expensive, because it feels like a race car.
Will it be reliable? The large-capacity, relatively understressed V8 suggests it should. A tough, well-proven automatic gearbox that has a track record of coping well with punishment should also mean fine durability. Unfortunately we'll never know for sure: the relatively tiny volumes coming out by AMG's Affalterbach factory means a Black Series-badged car is unlikely to ever figure in any reliability or satisfaction survey.
Latest Readers' Drives About the Mercedes CLK-Class Cabriolet
wrote on 17 07 2006