There are several ways to get to Monte Carlo once you've landed in Nice.
There's the train, a 23-minute meandering trek over and through the
wooded undulations of the intervening cities that deposits you at Monte
Carlo's downtown station. There's a taxi, more than 30 times the cost of
a train, and it takes twice as long, but it does offer
.
Or there's Heli Air Monaco with a fleet of choppers stationed at the
Nice airport. Those fine gents can get you to the Monaco heliport in
eight minutes, floating past seafront redoubts and over an azure
Mediterranean dotted with billions of dollars of sailing and motor
yachts.
Of those three modes of transport, only one is appropriate when Mercedes
has invited you to Monte Carlo to drive its new SLS AMG Roadster. We
offered the appropriate "
.
The roadster was engineered alongside the coupe, but it's taken two
years to remove the top for public purposes. It will take you two
minutes of top-down driving to begin quoting high school poetry in
homage to it: "Come with me and be my love," you'll coo, "and we will
all the pleasures prove...."
The Villa Key Largo is where we met our day's work, an angled row of SLS
AMG Roadsters lined up along the jetty. We chose a model wearing the
newest exterior color, metallic AMG Sepang Brown, a coat that ripples
with bronzed silverfish hues in any temperature of light, then goes all
brooding matte under cloud and shade. It is one of the nine exterior
colors available on the range, to go along with either red, black or
beige roof options. It is beautiful. Or, to borrow a descriptive
courtesy of British comedy duo Hale & Pace, it's "a knee-trembling
color, a crumpet magnet."
The roadster is veritably the coupe, tweaked. The engine remains the
6.3-liter (yes, that's really a 6.208-liter) V8 with 571 horsepower and
479 pound-feet of torque, but has been given revised intake air ducting
to reduce pressure losses. Through the twin pipes out back, it continues
to emit a subterranean bellow that's a mating call for monstrosities of
the Godzilla family.
Wrapped around it is an aluminum spaceframe and lightly adorned body.
The spaceframe itself is seven kilograms lighter than the engine, and
roadster's body-in-white is but two kilograms heavier than the coupe.
The mass of the fixed roof has been transferred into trusses behind the
instrument panel, the center tunnel, the soft top and gas tank, a carbon
fiber support behind the seats, and higher door sills with more
reinforcing chambers. All up, the roadster is 88 pounds heavier than its
gullwinged brother.
The three-layer cloth softtop surrounds bones of aluminum, magnesium and
steel, and stows behind the front seats. It folds into the shape of the
last letter of the alphabet in just 11 seconds, only debits you a
smidge of trunk space compared to the coupe, and it doesn't take up any
more space when it's stowed. It will answer your command at any speed up
to 31 miles per hour.
With powerplant alight, we pulled down the jetty, past the 100- and
200-meter yachts that reign over the Monte Carlo flotilla. Although the
SLS Roadster is a lean cut of meat – its only strip of "fat" being the
ample cushion between the grille and the front mid-mounted engine –it is
also a wide one. This isn't a problem through the streets of La
Condamine, past the Prince Albert Swimming Pool complex and marina, nor
over Boulevard Louis II. Nor is it a problem through the Formula One
circuit tunnel under The Fairmont Hotel, where every other driver is
giving his exhaust a workout as if testing its thunder against the
hell-beckoning drone of a Renault V8 on overrun.
Get out of Monaco proper, though, to neighboring cities like Roquebrune
or especially the hilltop hamlets like Èze where the streets take a more
narrow, Continental bent, and you'll be snapped to attention. With a
front track just 1.5 inches narrower than a
Lamborghini Aventador,
even a Peugeot touching the center line in the opposite lane will get
you focused on running the slot between it and the right shoulder. When
you meet an oncoming truck, that glorious V8 bellow gives way to the
sound of both your sphincters at DefCon 5 and Alec Guinness telling you
to "Use the Force" as if you're a young Skywalker trying to put a
missile down the Death Star's air vent.
But no matter your state of relaxation or anxiety, you will look very,
very good behind the wheel. The car is unconscionably low – you have to
look up to make eye contact with the copious number of women in the
equally copious number of
Ferrari California
droptops cruising the Côte. The removal of the roof eliminates the
aesthetic issues arising from the stubby cap atop the gullwing, so that
the portion of the car behind the engine appears more stretched out and
relaxed. The fixed-roof version also has blind spots so large they
should be called eclipses, and eliminating the roof makes three-quarter
vision to the rear much better, naturally. Yet the stack of the stowed
roof combined with the ground-floor seating means you only see the upper
pieces of cars close behind. You can raise the lower bolster, but that
robs you of your billionaire raconteur profile, and there's no reason to
acquire such rakish accommodations and then sit in a booster seat. With
the roof up, sightlines aft are comparable to a leather-lined,
cross-stitched pillbox. But really, why would you be driving with the
roof up anyway?
Additionally, removal of the roof positively soaks the cabin in exhaust
music, so that any other noise – your passenger speaking, for instance,
or actual music through the 1,000-watt, 11-speaker Bang & Olufsen
sound system – has to work its way through that low-level-earthquake
medium. Even with the slot-in wind deflector, the cabin isn't quiet,
it's sporting. Don't be surprised if you become a man or woman of few
words when behind the wheel. But really, why would you be talking,
anyway?
One of the roadster's most welcome features is its AMG Ride Control
suspension, with adaptive damping. Your author drove the coupe at its
launch two years ago and found its one-setting-only manners so severe
that we still remember the exact stretch of Northern California highway
when he thought, "Oh my God, this is annoying." It was outstanding on
the track – the only problem being that it was always braced for circuit
use. With the Ride Control suspension, the same recently experienced on
the
CLS63 AMG,
there's now a Comfort setting that is genuinely comfortable. What we
have here, fellow mavens, is a properly grand, grand tourer.
What we also have here, when aimed at Alpine switchbacks, is a properly
fettled ballistic missile. Crossing through into Ventimiglia, Italy and
turning northward into the mountains, we entered AMG's warped arcade
world: We were like a zig-zagging pinball in reverse, going up instead
of down. But since we're not talking about a lightweight – the SLS
Roadster weighs about 600 pounds more than a
Porsche 911 and about 80 pounds less than an
Aston Martin DBS – the action was is less pinball, more pin-boulder. Yet it was none the less awesome for it.
The Route de Col de Brouis is a concrete boa slithering its way up the
cliff's edge on its way to Brouis, our rest stop, through tunnels and
past nearly abandoned villages scarred by the acne of abandoned stone
buildings, broken windows and rusted industrial works. It is a brilliant
test of the go-fast game with sweepers to test at-speed cornering
stability and mid-curve undulations, tight-blind corners where the rock
face juts in into the apex to test quick steering jinks, construction
crews placed strategically around blind corners to test the six-pot
carbon brakes up front (in back are four-pot calipers straddling cast
iron discs), and the occasional ancient Citroën Berlingo coming around
yet more blind corners, in your lane, tilted up on its outside wheels
like a drunk camel, to test your sangfroid.
For this, you press the AMG Ride Control until both lights illuminate,
beyond Sport, to Sport +, for the firmest damping and the least
intrusive ESP program. Then you turn the driving mode dial to from C
(for "Controlled Efficiency"), past S and S+, to M (for "Manual"). That
sharpens the throttle and transmission responses, with the V8's throttle
flaps going wide open in just 150 milliseconds and shift times cut in
half to less than 100 milliseconds.
For further thrills, you can turn on the AMG Performance Media,
introduced with this car, and replace the nav screen with a series of
digitally reproduced analog dials that monitor everything from fluid
temperatures to power and torque output and throttle and brake position,
to acceleration and quarter-mile times, to G-forces. You can even teach
the system a racetrack – it comes with the Nürburgring and Hockenheim
pre-installed – and keep track of lap and programmable sector times.
Since you won't have time to watch the screen while you pilot – well,
not if you're doing it right – you can download the information to a USB
stick in the glove compartment and bask in your own motoring afterglow.
All that is in a world far, far away, however, once you work the gas
pedal and the tires. The V8 roars as it sucks in air and spits out
hundreds of horsepower and pound-feet, the tires quietly grope the
tarmac beneath and the SLS Roadster leaps to 60 miles per hour in 3.6
naturally-aspirated seconds. With yachtloads of gumption on hand, you're
never short of might. You could run up to fifth gear and down to second
for hairpins, taking advantage of the double-declutching that keeps
rapid downshifts from upsetting the balance, but even through the
180-degree bends, you could leave the convertible in third and easily
claw out of most apexes. It feels as if not a lick of energy is lost in
chassis twisting, either, as the roadster has been engineered to require
18,000 Newton-meters of force to flex a single degree, and later on, we
would discover that it is still compliant enough not to end up on three
wheels while navigating hairpins with insanely cambered apexes.
With two of your fingers on the metal paddles behind the thick,
leather-wrapped steering wheel, your right foot burying the throttle and
brake as the mountain demands, your eyes fixed just beyond the end of a
snout as long as Montana, and somewhere beside your right hand the red
dot on the G-Meter caroming all over its sphere, your head is filled
with the buzzing of three killer Bs: Brutal, Breakneck, Brilliant. Here
again, though, pay attention: as with the coupe, it will be kind to the
competent, but take your mind off the task and the back end is ready to
swap places if you've turned off the babysitters. The SLS AMG Roadster
is not the
Ferrari 458 Italia, nor is it meant to be – but the SLS AMG Roadster sits at the same table in terms of how well it does everything it does.
For when it's time to slow down, as we did when we reached the Auberge
du Col de Bruis, we remembered and could enjoy the fact that we were in a
Mercedes. Tucked among the thick Espresso Brown leather – a new color
for this year – are the Airscarf system in the headrests to blow
climate-controlled gusts on delicate necks, leather-lined roll-hoops
with integrated mesh, rather wide Alcantara-bound A-pillars, eight
airbags and screen after screen of motoring, technology and safety aids.
And also that 1,000-watt B&O auido that, having eased off for a
breath and a café, you can finally hear again should you wish. It would
be the perfect ride later on that evening, sashaying through the groves
of pink buildings jutting from Monégasque cliffs, headed to our seafront
room in the Le Mèridien Monte Carlo to enjoy a glass of wine and
meditation to the sight of billions of dollars of yachts lolling just
offshore.
But first there was coffee and pastry to be had, along with some
assistance from Anouk at the Auberge, who was kind enough to demonstrate
the working of the softtop. As I handed her the key and she admired our
Sepang Brown wonder, she noted, in a Franco-Belgian accent as seductive
as the convertible itself, "This is a beautiful car."
She could not be more right. The SLS AMG gullwing might be the most
badass SLS, but make no mistake about it, this, the roadster, is the
perfect SLS.
