From the February 1980 issue of Car and Driver.
One door opens, another closes. One day I was reading Mr. Editor Davis’s valediction to the Mercedes-Benz 450SEL; on the day before, I was driving the car that proved the aluminum engine of its new successors, the 380 and 500SE, in the latest S-class range of luxury supersedans from Daimler-Benz. You know all about them; you know they have been derived and developed from the present class, looking sleeker and fractionally longer to give a 14 percent reduction in wind resistance, and weighing less (at vast energy expense in making aluminum, which is much more consumptive of electricity than iron, in order to save energy in fuel consumption on the road). You know how well the change has been justified, no doubt, with the performance of the superseded range approached with engines of smaller displacement: the new 3.8-liter V-8 offers virtually the same output as the iron-blocked 4.5 (218 bhp) and a slightly increased top speed of 133 mph, while the 5.0-liter V-8, with an output of 240 bhp, brings the 500SEL sedan within reach of the prodigious performance of the 6.9-liter SEL. What you may not know is that the five-liter V-8 has been in production and on the roads in and around Germany for nearly two years now, since it was introduced at the 1977 Frankfurt Motor Show under the bonnet of the 450SLC.
Ever since it first appeared with 2.8-, 3.5-, and 4.5-liter engines, the SLC has been the most beautiful car in the Mercedes-Benz range, and surely one of the most beautiful in the world. Not that beauty is everything; but if it is not, I will stick my neck out and say that the SLC is also the best of all Mercedes. The 6.9 has more engine, more brakes, more suspension, and indeed more of most things; but they do not necessarily make it a better car than the 450SLC—any more than having a shorter wheelbase, fewer seats, and slightly better acceleration makes the 450SL better.
The “C” stands for “coupé,” which is ridiculous. “Coupé” means cut short, which is what this car is really not, being only a couple of inches shorter in the wheelbase than the corresponding sedan. On the other hand, it is fourteen inches longer in the wheelbase than the two-seater SL. In effect it is an SL that has been stretched to make room for four adults. It would make better sense if the C stood for “comfort.”
The SLC is not a mollycoddling Merc, but it is the most comfortable of them all. The sedans may be roomier, but their expansive seats, dimensioned and contoured to pillow the posteriors of the tycoonly fat, offer less intimate support to the torso than do the superbly shaped seats of this sumptuous car, which is itself superbly shaped. Gorgeous it looks from outside, but it is most specially delightful within: those seats are surely among the best anywhere, for I once spent 24 hours out of 26 (the other two hours were spent on a ferry) literally on end in one, sitting behind the wheel and never detecting the faintest discomfort. Maybe the seat does not fold back all the way, but it goes back far enough to constitute an adequate bed; and the SLC may accordingly qualify as a sports car.
After its success in the South American Rally, maybe the SLC has other such qualifications, yet it was surely never intended as a sports car. It is so elegant, so superbly balanced in form and in line, so exquisitely contoured to look beautiful from any angle, that to subject it to the gross indignities of competition would be sheer vandalism. Nevertheless the car begs to be driven in a sporting way—positively solicits the fast corner, the fine balancing of foot and hand, of centripetal and centrifugal accelerations. It is surely the best balanced and most impeccably behaved Mercedes-Benz ever to have been built for common sale. It is possibly a little less agile than the shorter and lighter SL, but in consistency and progressiveness of response to all control inputs, especially through the steering and brakes, it is the two-seater’s superior—which is just as well, because it looks it.
To rely on looks might be improvident, unless you can look closely enough to read the small print. It is not very small, for modesty is not a failing commonly encountered either in Stuttgart or in its satellite showrooms; but the subscripts on the ravishing rump of this beauty deserve to be conned closely. What looks like a 450SLC may turn out to be only a 280SLC, which is less good; or indeed it may be a 350SLC, which is even less good than the 280. On the other hand, a full-span rump-reading might detect the figure “5.0” in addition to the 450SLC identification, in which case it is as good as almost anything. Even if you cannot read, there is a modest spoiler ridging the top of the trunk lid which is in itself an adequate declaration that what you see is the 450SLC that goes as well as the 450SLC always should have done. This is the car in which—in blissful legality on the public highway, and in perfect and tactful safety among all manner of other people going about their daily drives—I averaged 133 mph over 20 miles, 126 mph over 40 miles. This is a car that is every bit as fast as it looks, and which displays its incomparable pedigree by being very much faster than it feels.
Take no great notice of the fact that the hood, deck lid, and bumpers are, like the engine, made of aluminum alloys. They might account for a reduction of 253 pounds in the curb weight of this car compared with the more commonplace 4.5-liter version, but since that represents only 7.6 percent of the 3338 pounds standing on those four fat Michelins, it is not likely to have a great deal of effect on the performance. The aerodynamic bib and tucker probably make a slight difference, though their principal virtue is in increasing the car’s high-speed stability; and the higher gearing, raised by 12.5 percent in the rear axle, would by itself only make the car slower. No, the thing that made that gearing possible and makes everything else justifiable is the thing that gives 240 hp at 5000 rpm somewhere adjacent to the driver’s right foot, the thing that is made of low-pressure, chill-cast, high-silicon aluminum alloy with electrolytically relieved cylinder bores that allow the plated pistons and rings to ride on the exposed silicon crystals without any nasty iron or steel liners in the way. It is the thing that has bigger bores to give it 10 percent more displacement than the 4.5-liter V-8, and bigger exhaust valves to give 11 percent more port area, along with 10.6 percent more power and 12.2 percent more torque. Intriguing exhaust valves, they are: Despite being 2 mm larger in head diameter, they are 2 mm more slender in the stem, and they are sodium-filled—which is a rare feature today, after more than half a century since Sam Heron invented sodium-filled valves for the Wright Simoon aircraft engine.
The Thing is just plain good, one of the most encouraging engines that a driver can find anywhere near his right foot; and it is just right for the SLC. Normally one barely hears it, for there is plenty of sound deadening (something has to account for all that weight), and the high gearing reduces the noise level inside the car even more at a given speed. Should you not fancy the speed given, however, the throttle pedal can be kicked or the transmission lever flicked and the most gorgeous growl issues from somewhere deep in the tiger bay. When it does, the car seems to leap—except that a leap is soon over, while this goes on and on, a great surge that seems to tip the road down the car’s gullet and turn the horizon bluer, as though a contracting universe were the essence of some new Daimler-Benz cosmological theory.
It is not a car for leaping away from standstill in drag races. There remain others, more intemperate and less enduring, that will explode off a starting line with greater vim and volume. According to its makers, the five-liter SLC reaches 62 mph in 8.5 seconds, though mine was slower. Against that must be set their claim for a maximum speed of 140 mph, whereas mine went quicker.
The plain facts according to my chronography are that, two-up, the car reached 62 mph in 8.6 seconds, 100 mph in a further 9.6 seconds, and when I wondered what speed it would reach in another 10-second increment I found the answer was 122 mph. These figures show just what a magnificent performer the SLC 5.0 is on real roads, as distinguished from illusory drag strips. It is magnificently high-geared, able to reach 66 mph in bottom gear at its redlined 5800 engine rpm, 108 in second gear, and—how much in top? Not 158, that is certain, though that is what would correspond to 5800 rpm. The roads I was using in southern Germany never stayed level enough for long enough; but I can tell you that the car did 137 mph uphill and 149 downhill, and that, according to Heuer and the half-kilometer markers, the speedometer was remarkably accurate.
You do not have to drive the car like that all the time in order to enjoy it, for it is impeccably mannered at any speed. If you do, you cannot expect to go for 320 miles before summoning the reserve three and a half of the 23.8 U.S. gallons of fuel in the tank, as you can if you content yourself with cruising at about half the car’s maximum speed. But if you have a long way to go, little time, and you want to arrive unstressed, this is the car in which to do it. If your route is not all unlimited autobahn, but is wet and wiggly, it is still the way to do it: I covered a good many miles sauntering through the stupefying sweeps of the Black Forest and, even when sauntering, the SLC 5.0 seemed a good deal quicker than anything else around. When given the boot it was only once beaten—by a chap in expensively beautiful leathers riding a 900 cc Ducati Desmo, looking gorgeous and sounding filthy, which eventually outaccelerated the Merc in a joint sprint off the end of a 40-kph speed limit and was never seen again until I spotted him refueling a few swervaceous miles down the road.
An SLC is one of the sweetest things in swervery, beautifully balanced and most reliably shod with the XWX tires that were until a couple of years ago the finest high-speed tires you could buy and are still the best suited to this particular car. Its power steering is among the best of its kind, feeling just a shade less light at very high speeds in the five-liter car, perhaps because its aerodynamic appendages help to keep its weight firmly on the ground. When going into tight comers, it is amazing how much grip is available to allow braking to be used right up to the apex; coming out of them, even wet ones, it is equally amazing how much traction is available, only the utmost extravagance producing a brief and eminently corrigible twitch of the tail. No wonder racing drivers like the car; being no kind of racing driver myself, I absolutely loved it. I admired the absence of wind noise; I adored the positivity of the automatic transmission (the sedans will be getting a four-speeder, which should be even better); and I am still trying to analyze the reasons for a Mercedes-Benz (any model, but especially this one) being so exceptionally reassuring to its passengers. It has about it an air of infallible competence. It contrives to do everything with such ease that its speed is simply not noticed, its acceleration simply taken for granted, its cornering ability accepted as a right rather than as a necessity.
If the passengers can be passively content, the driver can be actively happy. Beyond the trivial confines of 60 mph, the five-liter SLC is a lot livelier than the sedans. Yet for all its ability to go, the thing that most impressed me at the time and in retrospect was its ability to stop. Such brakes are seldom encountered in anything on wheels; only in the Bristol and the Porsche 928 have I met their peers. The most sensitive adjustment of speed to suit the pace of a pedestrian is as readily available at the pedal as the most almighty and sudden substitution of discretion for valor at speeds once the exclusive preserve of aircraft. Chasing time and rainbows along a damp autobahn, I occasionally came up behind some more modest little car committed to its own humble speedfeast, unable to get back into a slower lane until some daunting feat of bus-beating or beetle-crushing was tremulously accomplished—but a measured squeeze of the pedal would peremptorily negate all the Merc’s superior speed, to leave it ambling untroubled in the obstacle’s wake with half the original sighting distance still unconsumed. Whatever the speed or the other circumstances, the SLC brakes were just right. And so was everything else.
Source: Reviews - aranddriver.com
