Man Maths: Mercedes CLS 63 AMG Shooting Brake

The M157 wasn’t really a sports car engine, but shove that thing in a big saloon or estate car and magic would result. With a displacement of 5461cc and a pair of turbos, it made prodigious torque – as much as 664lb ft of the stuff in S63s and SL63s. For a certain sort of car, that matters far more than horsepower. If you want a big, heavy luxury car to be picked up and swept away like a deck chair caught in a tsunami, you need AMG’s 5.5-litre twin-turbo V8.

It was also rather good at spiriting a young(ish) Dan Prosser across a continent a dozen or so years ago. I was helping out on a video production and while the rest of the crew would fly from the UK to Modena, it was decided that I should drive. Nothing personal… Besides, since I’d be going by Mercedes CLS 63 AMG Shooting Brake, I was quite happy to. I’d be going by road for two reasons: firstly, we’d be using a drone to get aerial shots and the enormous octocopter (this was several years before the likes of DJI revolutionised the drone market with much smaller consumer products) couldn’t be taken on an aeroplane. Secondly, we’d need a fast car once there. More on that in a moment.

I set off from home in Bristol first thing, the small matter of 1000 miles and, according to the satnav, some 18 hours of driving ahead. It seems ludicrous now to have tackled that in one go, alone, but we all did foolish things in our mid-twenties. I did at least stop for a short nap somewhere in eastern France.

The car was magnificent. Quiet, comfortable, relaxing and, when I unleashed that 518bhp V8, the fastest thing for miles around. It’s a proper grand tourer, the CLS 63 AMG, and with a Shooting Brake estate body, just about the consummate all-rounder.

And, it turned out, not half bad on track for such a big old bus. The Modena Autodrome (which isn’t the Autodromo di Modena, where they held Grands Prix many years ago) packs a lot of twists and turns into a relatively small parcel of land. We were using it to film the new Pagani Huayra – another car with an AMG engine, albeit a V12 – and once the video team had shot the drive-bys and the drone guys had done their thing, it was time to capture some chase footage.

That meant attaching a bulky camera to the front of the Mercedes, whereafter I would drive as close as I dared to the multi-million quid Pagani as it drifted around the circuit’s looping turns. With the right settings dialled up for the engine, gearbox, steering and suspension, the CLS 63 AMG became a different animal. Suddenly it was agile, balanced and responsive, not in ultimate terms but certainly compared to the car it had been on the way down. It was the main reason those chase shots didn’t result in a smoking mass of twisted metal and shattered carbon fibre, one eight-cylinder AMG engine buried into a 12-cylinder one, and a particularly tricky insurance claim.

I’ve liked them ever since. Today you can buy 12-year-old cars for significantly less than £20,000. If you’re planning to drive from the West Country to northern Italy in one hit to do some high-speed camera car work, I can think of no better alternative for the money.

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