News Mercedes unleashes the ultimate SLS

It's safe to say that Bernd Maylander has a pretty cool job – after all, he is the bloke who drives the Safety Cars during the F1 Grand Prix weekends. However, even though he has a monstrous SLS GT as his part-time company car, we expect that he might want to pester Mercedes into letting him upgrade.

Why, you may ask? Because Benz's AMG department has taken the SLS, and made it a whole lot faster by turning the car into a 'Black Series' limited-run special.

Being inspired by the SLS GT3 racing car that has proven to be quite a competitive piece of kit, the SLS Black Series is, unsurprisingly, pretty quick. Thanks to the upgrades that we'll go into in the next paragraph, Mercedes claims that it'll hit 60mph from a standstill in 3.6 seconds, and reach a top speed of 196mph.

That performance is courtesy of the mildly reworked 6.2 V8, which – amongst a raft of other changes – now redlines at 8,000rpm, and power's up to 622bhp. In comparison, Maylander's car tops out at 7,200rpm and "only" develops 581bhp.

Whilst the eagle-eyed automotive anoraks amongst you may notice that the SLS GT is faster in a straight line (by a mere 3mph), the SLS Black Series will most likely be the faster car through the bends: it's, at 1,550kg, 70kg lighter than the standard car, whilst the carbon-fibre aerodynamic trinkets claim to substantially improve the car's overall levels of downforce.

Couple that with the wider tracks fore and aft, the addition of carbon-ceramic brakes as standard (how very kind of them!) and essentially race-inspired suspension, and you've got a machine that's pretty well suited to track work.

Oh, and Mercedes claim that the new titanium exhaust system makes the SLS Black Series sound even more "distinctive" than the regular SLS. Which, given it sounds ace in its current guise, means we have high hopes for it being one of the greatest engine notes of any modern production car.

Mercedes-Benz is set to unveil the new SLS Black Series later this month at the Los Angeles Auto Show, where all the other corporate details such as the car's release date and production-run figure (Black Series cars have historically had very short production runs, and rumours are suggesting Mercedes only build 200 examples of the SLS Black) will almost certainly be announced.

We're also hoping that a rather tasty promo trailer is announced at the car's official debut in LA as well, so we can have something to spend hours ogling at analyse critically and report on in a future Team VVV news piece.

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