I was in a Maybach about halfway up the Angeles Crest Highway when I saw a Mercedes going the other way. There was a cheap Mercedes in the US called the W203 liftback, but it was a poor little car. It’s not something you’d think someone would change, so I gasped when I heard it pass me with a V8. @c55.vick, who made it, opened the hood to reveal an engine room full of 5.4 liters of Mercedes M113 V8 from the CLK 55 AMG. I was lucky enough to be running with him at a turnoff. The owner has owned and modified Mercedes cars for a long time and has held real AMGs before choosing to build this instead of keeping them. His reasoning was easy to understand: the AMG cars share subframes with the V6-powered C320, and this little hatchback is the lightest and stiffest of the W203 C-class. He said that making the AMG that Mercedes never made was “like building with Lego.” The standard six-speed manual gearbox, the 362-horsepower V8 engine, and the wiring harness are all bolted right up. It fits inside without having to cut any lines. You wouldn’t think twice about the engine bay if you didn’t know that Stuttgart didn’t install the V8. It had the appearance of having been produced in a factory. Also, you would never think the engine was found in a junkyard for $800 and has 200,000 miles on it. It still pulls as hard as the day it was new. The engine sounds rougher than it is because of the long ratios and the Mercedes exhaust tone. This makes the middle more enjoyable than you might expect from an engine with a redline of only 6,200 rpm. The engine is fun to drive even though it only has one cam and three valves because its power increased significantly in the last 1,000 rpm. It is also faster than the car it’s based on because it doesn’t weigh as much as the CLK 55, which weighs almost two tons. Someone owns it and says it has a heavier nose than a stock car. I would never call it blunt, though. More than anything, it felt quicker than the Ford Mustang GT I drove last summer. The chassis (along with some cheap coilovers) and brakes were most likely taken from the CLK 55. This re-bodied AMG doesn’t want the attention that a “real” one would get. One of my coworkers, Chris Rosales, said it looked like a Chevrolet Camaro while driving. From the back seat, I thought, “That wasn’t very nice.” It has better vision, more space, and is more comfortable. Furthermore, the owner thinks it’s cheap enough to use daily, which he has done. The Mercedes is still polite, comfy, and easy to drive when you’re not winding it out. This fan-AMG looks much like the other modified cars I’ve driven, ranging from race cars that won their class to scruffy race trucks. The owner says upgrading from the CLK 63 to the 6.2-liter M156 will clarify that the driveshaft, axles, and limited-slip differential need to be better. It will also get fog lights, the front bumper from the CLK 63, and bigger wheels. It would look better with a more prominent back spoiler to make it more ready to pounce. It will be the best AMG that Mercedes forgot to make, and the person who made it hopes that more people will choose to buy these vital but undervalued coupes. After all, most classic cars from the 1990s are about to be phased out, and cars from the 2000s will take their place as today’s affordable, adjustable cars.
