2013 Mercedes-Benz SL

January 5th, 2012 |

Author: gopung

I have to be careful. There are a lot of police around today,” said Jurgen Weissinger. He’s the chief engineer for the complete Mercedes-Benz sports car line — and specifically for the highly camouflaged SL550 in which I was a passenger, the model to be revealed at the 2012 Detroit show.

That we were rocketing uphill on a winding two-lane mountain road at about 110 mph made his words slightly inappropriate, but since the car felt as if we were proceeding quietly at half that speed, I was relaxed and just enjoyed the ride.

When the SL series started some six decades back with sports racing cars, the chief engineer for the project was Rudolf Uhlenhaut, who had been responsible for engineering Mercedes grand prix cars in the 1930s.

He was famously known to be an exceptionally capable driver, as fast as — or even faster than — the drivers of the racing team, although he never competed in motorsports. Born in London, he spoke English like a native.

Weissinger very much reminds me of the great man, in that he’s fluent in English and is as reassuringly masterful on the road as any of the world-champion racing drivers I’ve ridden with over the years.

Weissinger knows the roads in the Swabian Alps south of Stuttgart like a native because he is one, born and raised in the area he likes to use for testing, so his local knowledge removes one more variable from exploration of a car’s ability.

And this SL’s ability is considerable. The ride is amazingly comfortable, worthy of a limousine yet dead flat and free of any hint of wallow or sogginess. “The springs are soft, the damping firm,” Weissinger offered, but he had no need to explain; the chassis spoke for itself.

The SL is completely new, with a cutting-edge chassis made entirely of aluminum. Massive chilled-cast aluminum structural members are joined with extruded sections by bonding, bolting,

MIG welding, and friction-stir welding to make an enormously rigid structure to which all-new suspension elements are fixed. They’re aluminum, too.