After that last Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth, I thought I’d get back on the right track with another SLS that is much more special. This 2012 up for sale in Germany starts out tame enough in Obsidian Black Metallic, but when you open those doors you get hit with a color combo that I’ve never seen before and didn’t even think was possible. It is worth the click.
Don’t sleep on the Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG. Not saying you are, but they don’t seem to get a lot of love compared to all the other wild and crazy cars out there. Maybe it was just a strange time to launch an exotic super car, or maybe it looks too much like an SL, but I think this car is very much something that will go down in history as a car to have. I’ve pleaded the case many times before for the SLS, so I figured I’d do a yearly reminder that these are probably at the bottom of the price curve right now as they are nearing 10 years-old. It has Gullwing doors for goodness sake!
If you told me I had to go spend every last penny of my money that wasn’t used to sleep or eat, I’d probably go buy a Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG. Why? It has everything. Power, looks, exclusivity, and most importantly, Gullwing doors. In all seriousness, this car is a monster. My editor Carter instructed in one at a supercar event and the car looks like it was ready to eat every single cone for lunch then move onto eating the light poles next. This isn’t a re-bodied SL63 with some fancy doors. This is a exotic super car. It was first Mercedes-Benz automobile designed and built from scratch entirely by AMG. It had the the world’s most powerful naturally aspirated production series engine at the time. They had to nail this car and they did. In all honestly, I probably couldn’t handle this car at anything more than 50% of what it is capable of. It’s too much. One of my daily drivers is a 240D for heaven’s sake. All this still isn’t stopping me from saving every penny though.
The Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG had the nearly impossible task of being the spiritual successor of the legendary 300SL Gullwing. I say ‘nearly impossible’ because if one car could measure up to the 300SL nearly 50 years later, the SLS AMG somehow managed. Jeremy Clarkson raved about SLS AMG calling it “the greatest car in the world” at the time and that ”this is the thinking man’s supercar”. I agree completely. The team at AMG managed to make a beautifully contoured car with Gullwing doors and somehow engineered it to get to 60 mph in the mid-three second range and top out at 200 mph. All of this is possible in a car so comfortable and easy to live with that you could use it as a daily driver. It was the ultimate grand tourer with doors to die for. Granted, if you were the kind of person to buy a SLS you almost certainly had other vehicles in your fleet and that seems to be the case with today’s car. This 2011 painted in the sleek Obsidain Black checks in with just 4,500 miles and looks every bit the part. The even better news, once you swing open those doors, the car only looks better.
Very rarely do I check out Mercedes-Benz race cars because I don’t see many publicly for sale out there and just don’t have a ton of knowledge on them either. One does pop up for sale once in a blue moon and it usually is a pretty unique and purpose-built car. They also don’t come cheap at all. Today’s car, a 2017 AMG GT3, is all of those things. This car was built to go IMSA racing at the WeatherTech SportsCar Championship against other exotics that are built off production chassis that you probably recognize from Porsche, Ferrari, BMW, Audi, Lamborghini, Ford and a few other brands. Not a cheap endeavor at all, but nothing is cheap when it comes to racing unless you buy a $500 car from Craigslist, spray paint some numbers on the door and go drive around on some dirt until the radiator starting boiling.
To all our American readers, Happy Thanksgiving! To all our readers outside the United States, sorry you have to work today but hopefully today’s car makes up for it. The Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG was the spiritual successor to the legendary 300SL that was produced from 1954 to 1963, mainly because of it’s distinctive gullwing doors and blistering performance. When the SLS launched in 2010 it not only wowed people with its design but with it’s power that launched this car to 60 mph in the mid-three second range.
Of course like the original 300SL, a roadster would soon follow for the SLS, which is what today’s car in California is. I like to think of the roadster versions of the 300SL and SLS like when Michael Jordan quit basketball and went to play minor league baseball. Jordan built his legacy and fame in basketball so much that you literally had tens of thousands of people following him around just to watch him strike out in Birmingham, Alabama. That’s what happened with these cars – you take away the gullwing doors and it’s just another Mercedes roadster, just like Jordan was just another minor league baseball player. But it’s the past reputation, along with how great a driver’s car they were in the first place, that kept these models in demand and values on par with the original. Go check out values for a 300SL Roadster, they are usually in the $1,000,000 to $1,400,000 range, right where the gullwing cars are. The same is happening with the SLS, with the Roadster prices side by side with comparable Gullwing cars. Logic would say the whole point of this car was the doors and it would carry a premium over the Roadster, but I think that would be true if Mercedes-Benz mailed it in on the rest of the car — which they clearly didn’t.
While I try to vary the posts up a bit, there’s no denying that my regular “Motorsports Monday” posts are dominated by Porsche and BMW. Occasionally, I search far and wide and manage to include an Audi into the mix, but our readership undoubtedly doesn’t associate this column with Mercedes-Benz products. On top of that, the name of this particular car which is bucking that trend also isn’t unusually associated with the three-pointed star – “GT3”. So synonymous with Porsche is that combination of letters and a single number that one could overlook that it dictates the rules for an entire class of cars in the FIA. Since I like rather unusual candidates anyway, I was excited to see one of the very limited production C197 SLS GT3s come up for sale on eBay this week:
