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2005 Mercedes-Benz CLK-DTM AMG

2005 Mercedes-Benz CLK-DTM AMG

Published September 2, 2016 by Andrew

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Move over Black Series, your body work is out classed here. A little over 11 years ago Mercedes took their normally tame CLK and went insane. Modeled after the 2003 CLK which won the DTM championship that year, the road-going CLK-DTM was much more than the typical AMG offerings that simply added on to the standard car that came from Mercedes. This car was totally rethought and the majority of it was re-engineered. That’s what makes this car so different from a CLK55 both inside and out. Even more special is that they only produced 100 coupes and 80 convertibles, with none of them being sold in the U.S.. But today we have this 1 of 100 car for sale in West Palm Beach, Florida. So let’s take a closer look at this DTM monster for the streets.

CLICK FOR DETAILS: 2005 Mercedes-Benz CLK-DTM AMG on Hemmings

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Tuner Tuesday: 2006 Porsche 911 Carrera 4S Ruf Kompressor

Tuner Tuesday: 2006 Porsche 911 Carrera 4S Ruf Kompressor

Published September 8, 2015 by Carter

Tuned cars from the 1980s were never particularly discrete, nor were they cheap or easy to come by. Tuners like Treser, in an effort to get more power out of the notoriously non-tunable CIS injection system that adorned nearly all German cars in the 1980s, got creative by taking a 928 fuel distributor for the V8 motor and sticking it on the inline-5 turbo unit. Others, like AMG, took the biggest motor they could build and stuck that into a bunch of different cars. Ruf turned up the boost on the 911 range by moving the turbocharged flat-6 into narrow-body cars. But none of this came cheaply, nor were these tuned cars always the most reliable. When it came to the period of electronic fuel injection, though, things started to change. The first chip-tuned cars also had some bad habits; my father’s chipping 944 Turbo, for example, runs quite rich and if you engage the cruise control, the computer believes you want to go 170 m.p.h. and plants the throttle wide open. But they’ve become increasingly reliable and almost a given; plus they’re cheap. On a car like my 1.8T Passat, you can get a reflash of the ECU with programmable modes for around $500; it can be done in just a few moments, and adds somewhere in the vicinity of 50 horsepower and 80 lb.ft of torque. As such, if you really want to go wild in a tuned car these days, simply changing the ECU to a hotter map isn’t enough. No, if you’re someone like Ruf, you’re still pushing the bounds – or, perhaps, compressing them:

CLICK FOR DETAILS: 2006 Porsche 911 Carrera 4S Ruf Kompressor on eBay

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2003 Mercedes Benz SL55 AMG

2003 Mercedes Benz SL55 AMG

Published July 14, 2015 by Andrew

Of the contemporary Mercedes models, the SL55 AMG is certainly among my favorites. The lines on this car are about as good as it gets for the time period and few Benzes pulled off the double oval headlights as well as the SL did. It is a true testament to the quality of the design that the car still looks fresh even though it’s 12 years old. For me a big part of that formula are the Type V “Turbine” wheels. These have always been my favorites on the R230 cars, they’re equal parts opulence and performance, much like the car itself. An SL55 AMG is one of those cars I will forever aspire to own, if only for a brief period of time because I know the kind of road trips it would inspire me to take. Long jaunts for no apparent reason other than to enjoy the drive and end up at an enjoyable locale, that’s the kind of thing these cars are built for. Could you use one as a daily driver? From a reliability standpoint I’m sure you could, the 5.4L supercharger V8 has proven reliable over the years. I’d certainly have no problem pulling this thing out of a garage every day but in some ways I think that’d defeat the purpose of the car. It’s a purpose built cruiser with loads of power, it begs to be driven hard on long stretches of road. My guess is the seller would agree given that they’re the 3rd owner and the car has just 30k on the clock.

Click for details: 2003 Mercedes Benz SL55 AMG on MBWorld.com

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1998 Mercedes-Benz SLK 230 Kompressor

Published February 4, 2015 by Andrew

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At age 10 I was really into collecting die-cast models from Maisto and I vividly remember picking up a 1/18 scale version of the car you see above. As a 10 year old a model of a bright yellow roadster with a functional folding top seems pretty damn cool but only a few short years later after seeing a real one I found myself thinking “that car is so lame.” Of course it was completely due to the circumstances in which I saw the car (tacky retirees at the wheel) and the fact that my automotive tastes had begun to shift towards overwrought Japanese vehicles. If only I had realized in my youth what I have realized now, the R170 SLK is a pretty nifty little car and holds an important place in Mercedes Benz history.

With it’s folding steel convertible top the first gen SLK was quite the head turner in it’s debut year. Mercedes sold 55,000 of the retro-futuristic roadsters worldwide and it snagged the title of North American Car of the Year from Car & Driver in 1998. Weighing a respectable 3,036 lbs. and featuring a 185hp supercharged inline-4 engine, the SLK 230 Kompressor moved from naught to 60 in 7.2 seconds which for the olden days of the late ’90s was pretty good. It marked Mercedes’ return to making a light little roadster with a four cylinder engine, something they hadn’t done since the glory days of the 190SL. I think it’s safe to say that had the SLK not been successful, Mercedes may not have figured out that it’s ok to put smaller motors in their cars when it suits the chassis.

CLICK FOR DETAILS: 1998 Mercedes-Benz SLK230 on eBay

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