Automotive Faqs

Having an AMG badge is a seriously enviable mark of distinction. It says you have the money to go the extra mile and suggests you have a taste for power and perhaps even the talent to manage it. So here’s an example of badging that’s enviable and then some. The hottest member, in fact, of a very hot family: lighter than its CLK stablemates, with more power, less mass, and more of everything else, brakes, tires, and suspension.

It’s also reassuring to reflect that this car has a real racing heritage, mechanically identical to cars that appear on Formula 1 Grand Prix racetracks every weekend. Why were we at the Ring? And what’s this got to do with the U.S. market? We’ll get to that in a minute. Mercedes currently offers 18 AMG products, and discerning buyers, half of them living in the U.S., gobble ’em up as fast as they’re produced. Emboldened by this success, the AMG marketing brain trust came up with the Next Step: a special edition of an existing AMG product.

Think about that. Since all AMG models are special editions, we’re talking about a special edition of a special edition: Meet the CLK63 AMG Black Series. As the name suggests, it’s an embellishment of the current CLK63 AMG coupe, which isn’t offered in the U.S. Cabrios are the only ones available in the U.S. But the Black Series is an exception to that rule, the first of its kind to be offered to U.S. buyers. The Black Series begins with a CLK63 AMG coupe, a pretty lofty starting point. Black Series upgrades are extensive. Bigger brakes, 14.2-inch vented rotors front (versus 13.4 for the CLK63). AMG refers to the rotors as “composite,” which in this case means iron discs mated to aluminum carriers.

Bigger wheels: 19-inch forged aluminum versus 18s for the standard CLK63, with larger footprints of 265/30 front and 285/30 rear. The wider tires are sheltered by carbon-fiber fender flares, and carbon fiber is abundant throughout the car, right out to the small spoiler adorning the decklid and the diffusers below the rear fascia. Although the Black Series has all the luxo goodies that make the going pleasant in other Benz offerings, the carbon fiber, plus other weight-paring measures, conspire to reduce curb weight by about 100 pounds versus the CLK63 coupe’s and some 200-plus pounds versus the cabrio’s.

That math puts the Black Series around 3900 pounds, a number we wish were even lower.
Suspension: AMG sport dampers replace the standard Mercedes equipment, with higher spring rates and bigger anti-roll bars. Shock-absorber damping is adjustable, but not from the cockpit, and there’s also 20mm of adjustability in the static ride height, provided you have the right tools. As with other recent AMG offerings, the CLK Black Series is propelled by the new AMG 6.2-liter aluminum V-8. In this application, a special set of exhaust headers and revised engine management raise output from 475 horsepower and 465 pound-feet of torque to 500 and 478, respectively.

As incremental gains go, that may not sound like much. But mated to a shorter final drive, a little less mass, and reprogrammed shift parameters for the seven-speed automatic transmission, it feels like more than not much. In fact, it feels like a lot, particularly with Nürburgring corners rushing toward us like Ronin on fast forward. AMG’s acceleration forecast is 0-to-60 mph in 4.1 seconds. Since we’ve already recorded a 4.2 for the CLK63 cabrio, less power, more mass, 4.1 seems pretty conservative. 

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