Category: Exotic Sports 
Price Range: £59,975 to £153,050
Truly colossal power, Gotham City looks, very refined
Stiff ride, unresolved handling, a touch pricey
Objectively impressive, but too flawed to carry its price tag with confidence
The normal forces of nature appear not to apply to the SL Black Series. Take a conventionally quick car like, say, a Porsche 911 and if you were to accelerate as hard as possible from 80mph, it would surge smoothly forward. The SL doesn't do this: it slams you back in your seat and if the road you're on is anything other than smooth and straight, will likely overwhelm the grip of the massive 325-section rear tyres. At 120mph it accelerates like most quick cars do at 60mph. Ignore the claimed 3.8sec sprint to 62mph because that time is hugely compromised by the comparative lack of traction inherent in any front-engined, rear drive layout, More impressive is the claimed 11sec required to sprint from rest to 125mph. Any car that can reach 100mph in 11sec is a paid-up member of the supercar club, but getting to 125mph in that time? That is an entirely different league of performance. Even the fabled SLR McLaren would not be able to keep up with this, thanks not only to its less powerful engine but also an inferior power-to-weight ratio.
But in other ways, the Black Series appears strangely behind the times. The five-speed autobox is quite clearly there through circumstance rather than choice: even in the quicker of its two shift modes, each change takes around 0.25sec or around 2.5 times longer than its takes to swap one of six cogs in its closest rival, the Ferrari 599GTB.
Likewise its handling is nothing like as crisp and sharp either as its looks suggest or its Ferrari opposition. And it's quite clear to see why: while Mercedes is to be commended for shaving 250kg off the kerbweight of a normal SL65, the Black Series still weighs a considerable 1870kg, which is 180kg more than the 599GTB. And while the Ferrari balances the weight of its engine by placing the gearbox between its rear wheels, the Mercedes does not, making it distinctly nose-heavy. On the road it can be pointed accurately and there's no doubting the huge levels of grip it will generate, but this is a car designed predominately for track work and here it struggles. It loses grip at the front too easily and is therefore prone to running wide at the exit of corners.
At least there are no issues with the brakes: they are not carbon ceramic as you might expect for this kind of money (and are now standard on every Ferrari), but they're still massively powerful and almost immune to fade, even after many laps of serious track work.
