Category: Exotic Sports 
Price Range: No data available
Very fast, very stiff, surprisingly comfortable.
Big and heavy, limited practicality.
Roadster is more appealing than the coupe, but it's still hard to see past the price.
It's a big car, but big people may struggle to get in, as you have to limbo dance under the door and then plunge bum-first into the low carbon and leather bucket seat. Once you're in it's roomy and has many components familiar to Mercedes drivers, but the roof is all-new. You have to unclip the roof manually and give it a nudge upwards, but the rest is done automatically. It's simple and quick, and the manual contribution has a pleasingly nautical feel to it.
Even with the roof down the V8 engine is oddly muted at low speeds, but as the revs pick up you get a good growl from the exhaust pipes and a whine from the supercharger. The SLR Roadster is a car made for blasting along mountain passes and through tunnels.
Manoeuvring around town can be tricky, as you can't see the car's extremities from the low driving position, and the steering is heavy at walking pace. But once you get going the whole thing starts to make sense. The engine is in front of the driver but behind the front axle, giving the same good weight distribution as the coupe, and the suspension is unchanged. It gives a superb ride - a little hard on bad surfaces, but the suspension is fantastically effective at keeping the wheels on the road while insulating the driver and passenger. The carbon fibre body plays a crucial role here, its rigidity all but eliminating the shake you expect in a roadster.
There are Comfort and Sport modes for the five-speed automatic box, and you can shift manually via paddles or stick. You can also choose from three gearshift speeds, depending on how relaxed or frenzied you're feeling. It's a very smooth gearbox, and the five ratios are plenty for an engine this torquey.
The supercharged 5.4-litre V8 is one hell of an engine, unchanged from the coupe. Peak power output of 617bhp comes at 6,500rpm and peak torque of 575lb-ft is available from 3,250 to 5,000rpm. These are colossal outputs, giving a top speed of 206mph with the roof up, which is just 2mph less than the coupe, and the 0-62mph time is the same at 3.8 seconds.
Even more impressive is the extraordinary feeling that this power is not an utter irrelevance. The stiffness of the body and the excellence of the suspension combine to make the SLR feel highly composed, so putting your foot down doesn't immediately turn the McMerc into a bucking, sliding, squealing beast.
Of course there are limits: it's a wide, heavy car that's too big to drive fast on narrow, twisty lanes, which is why it's not a sports car; for the same reason you probably wouldn't want to use it on the track. It's much more at home on dual carriageways, but the presence of other road users will still mean you're reining it in more than you're letting it off the leash.
When you're spending so very, very much on a car, you expect it to be not just highly impressive but somehow transcendentally, magically good. The SLR doesn't quite manage to escape Earth orbit. You never quite forget how many Porsches, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Bentleys, Maseratis and Aston Martins you can get for this money.
