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Cars
 Mercedes' limited-edition halo car
November 7, 2004
DANVILLE, Va. -- We turn a tight corner beneath an oak tree and launch ourselves down the Virginia International Raceway's longest straightaway, where, in seconds, the track rises and disappears into the sky ahead.
There is a hiss outside -- water from the wet track -- and an incessant thump in my head warning me that, "If you're doing 160 miles per hour down this straight, you do have to slow down for this corner." To mix metaphors, loyal readers will note that today we are driving the third leg of a three-super-car milking stool. Three major super cars -- essentially street-legal race cars capable of speeds beyond 200 miles per hour -- hit the market this year, the market being a handful of folks who can afford them. We just get to drive them. The $440,000 Porsche Carerra GT? Been there. The $150,000 Ford GT? Done that. So here we are behind the wheel of the third super car, the 2005 Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren, a $452,000 car developed by Mercedes with its Formula One racing partner, McLaren. Only 3,500 will be built. It is a halo car, for sure, "designed not to be a super race car, but a super road car," said Brian Redman, a factory driver for Formula One cars, at the SLR's introduction. His other thought before we hit the track: "Remember, blood is slippery." Yet driving the car on the roads in any sensible manner would never touch its potential, and so we came here to the tricky racetrack in Virginia, with its long straights and funky turns, for a taste of what lurks within a car that a few lucky folks in the world will ever own. And who was there to greet us but Stirling Moss (Sir Stirling, today), who won the famed 1955 Mille Miglia in a 1955 300 SLR, averaging almost 100 miles per hour over 1,000 miles of tortuous Italian roads. It proved a Mobius strip-like time warp to watch Moss leave our launch area in his own famed "722" Mercedes SLR. (He had a push to get him going and slowed down by shutting off his engine in gear a few hundred yards uptrack (no brakes) to coast to a stop.) Virginia International Raceway is a track I have never driven well. It has double-apex corners, tricky S-curves, blind climbs at speed. "And most of all," as Frank McCourt wrote, "We were wet." Plus the car weighs nearly two tons (3,780 pounds), and hurtling that much weight down a straightaway, corner approaching, was enough to make me cautious. But don't blame the car. It is a stiff sword of a car with carbon fiber used in its monocoque structure, crash framing, and body panels. It is a sword swung by an arm that is a 5.5-liter, supercharged, V-8 engine that will take it to 207 miles per hour and 0-60 in under 4 seconds. The transmission starts out as a high-performance automatic and only gets better. It can be set for comfort, sport, or manual mode, with sport offering crisper shifts at higher r.p.m's. In manual, it can be shifted by paddles on the steering wheel or by flicks of the shifter. Also, manual can be set -- depending on the response and speed of shifts demanded -- on sport, super sport, or race. And mind you, this is the guts of an elegant car that you enter by opening gull-wing doors to squeeze yourself into tight leather seats whose bolsters clamp you tightly even before you belt up. Brakes are fiber-reinforced ceramic and, I can tell you, with stability control added, they will bring you to a stop from 100 miles per hour with all the smooth grace of a Pedro fastball hitting Varitek's glove. Of course, those stops are aided by an air brake that pops up from the trunk during hard stops at speeds over 59 miles per hour. Many folks who buy this car may never get to know what it really will do. They won't care because they will know that, out there, somebody else knows. And they will bask in that halo. But it's like my father, Newt, a fine carpenter, says when customers (mostly doctors) complain that his bills are too high for the hours spent: "It ain't the doin'; it's the knowin.' " © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company. |
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