It must be impossible to exist a car enthusiast who is indifferent to the sports cars. Each one can prefer off-roads, limousines, crossovers or another particular style, but there’s always a high-performer to build a taste intersection. This is one explanation to the huge expectation created among both the press and the public specially by the big automakers. Now it’s Mercedes-Benz’s time to direct the spotlights to this very important car: it’s the famous Black Series coming to one of their most charismatic products.
Although each and every sports car has plenty of reasons to attract a customer, there are so many brands and models of them that it becomes very hard for a particular one remain taking the public’s attention through the years. This must be the reason to the arrival of so many special series. They can come to celebrate special events, begin the application of new components or only to spice up the car’s sales – Bugatti Veyron already had dozens of them, for instance. But Mercedes’ Black Series is already known due to the reputation brought by being an improvement of the AMG division, which already represents the high-performance versions of all the brand’s cars. This recipe resulted so attractive that has deserved to be extended to several cars. Therefore, after the huge success with the C-Class Coupé, it was time to see what would happen by combining it to the most powerful car of their showroom. These pictures begin to describe the wonderful result achieved, with the addition of imponent spoilers and bigger air intakes which give an excellent first impression: the car does look different from the conventional SLS, but without the cliché of attempting to resemble a race car. However, the irony of seeing those cars’ official pictures in lots of colors but black may come from avoiding too much resemblance with the famous Brabus special adaptations.
The most fanatic enthusiats already know that all this aerodynamic kit has much more functions than to make the car take the attentions at the street, though. The Black Series came with several components made of titanium and carbon fiber (the Germans wouldn’t be cruel to the point of only painting those external details in that particular gray) in order to reduce weight, and at the same time there was an engine improvement. Therefore, these three very effective ways of optimizing the performance have maximized the power of the 6.2 V8, which by the way now delivers 622 hp. Using a seven-speed transmission, this car has lowered its own 0-60 mph record to 3s5 and raised the top speed to 196 mph. All of that comes, of course, with a fully-equiped interior, including racing seats with red belts. But driving a car from this level requires bigger concerns with a perfect handling and even better safety, and that’s when Mercedes answers with items such as the modified suspension, to deliver much better behavior, and ceramic calipers to improve the brake system, because of the excellent reputation of these components concerning their operation in high temperatures. This car will hit the European streets only in next June, so there’s no official price defined yet. The SLS AMG must follow the other Black Series members and be sold as a limited edition.