I really enjoy these Depth of Speed videos. They do a great job capturing the essence of what it means to love a car like the owner of this Mercedes Benz Gullwing 300SL. He’s wanted one since he was 10 years old and now that he’s made it in life, he’s got one. It’s kept mechanically sound and the owner drives it everywhere. No sterile trailer life for this car.
It really doesn’t get much better than this if you like cars. Lets round up the three best track oriented street cars that are currently made and set them loose in the hands of one of the best car reviewers alive today. Chris Harris pits the BMW M3 GTS and the Mercedes-Benz C63 AMG Black Series against his personal Porsche 911 GT3 RS 4.0 Liter. These are the most hardcore track oriented street cars currently made by major manufacturers. The key distinction of this genre of cars is that they should perform well on track as well as being just practical enough to able to drive to the track. That’s what sets these cars apart from something like the KTM X-bow. In the first part of the video, Harris explains the background and philosophy of each car. The second part of the video involves taking all three cars to the track to set lap times and to see how well you can hoon in them. Dreaming about stuff like this is a big chunk of what being a car guy is all about.
As a thank you to their 2 million YouTube fans, Mercedes Benz AMG drifted the new 2012 C63 AMG around Laguna Seca including the corkscrew:
2012 marks the return of BMW to the German Touring Car Championship (DTM). It will be Audi, Mercedes-Benz and BMW fielding cars this year. I’ll probably put together another post later about the newest generation of DTM cars, but they basically have nothing in common with the road going cars besides the headlights. All three teams will be using the same basic carbon tub as the foundation of their cars for 2012. I felt like that kind of took a lot of the meaning out of what it meant to have the three manufacturers racing each other. Then I was reminded of one of my favorite car videos on the internet. It’s a tribute to what the editor calls “The Golden Years of DTM.” This is back when the race cars were prepped versions of the mass production cars and they still raced on the Nordschleife.
This is one of the first videos that Chris Harris did for the Drive YouTube Channel. It’s one of my favorites of his because it’s more of a commentary on car design philosophy than a review. His experiment involves putting the new 2012 Mercedes Benz C63 AMG on space saver spare tires. The reasoning was to replicate the feel of a car with a lot more horsepower but you could say he just wanted it easier to oversteer. Harris calls the experiment a resounding experiment as he drifts the C63 around the entire track. The take away point is that cars with state of the art traction and stability control are fast on the Nurburgring but they’re not necessarily fun on the street. That simple sense of fun is responsible for the success of cars like the Mazda Miata, the Nissan S-Chassis cars and the new Toyota FT-86/Subaru BRZ.