I Wish I Knew How To Quit You

The Affalterbach cowboys unveil their latest creation, the Mercedes-AMG GT 4-Door. Yippee-ki-yay.

- Josh Jacquot

BECAUSE MERCEDES-AMG is a company filled with stoic, formally dressed Germans, you should believe them when they say that the chassis in their new GT 4-Door is stiffer than the E63 S sedan’s, that it can better support higher cornering loads from its wide tires, and that all this is necessary to undergird the highest-output version of the company’s twin-turbocharged 4.0-liter V-8 produced to date. Yet when all 630 of the GT63 S’s snarling horses are loosed, you’ll understand that all the austerity is only a thin veneer spread over the Affalterbach cowboys’ true lunatic temperament and that their Dressler suits are merely a façade worn over John Force Underoos.

The GT63 S, after all, comes standard with Drift mode.

This latest AMG creation is so potent, in fact, that those same cowboys felt it necessary to limit the cars we drove on roads around Austin, Texas, to 100 mph, disable Drift mode, and permanently enable stability control. Possibly they know us as well as we know them. The GT63 S accelerates so rapidly that when the electronic reins began to tighten at about 90 mph—to keep us from pulverizing the 100-mph limit—we’d only been in the throttle for about four seconds. So we believe AMG CEO Tobias Moers when he tells us that the GT63 S will lap the Nürburgring in the region of 7 minutes, 30 seconds—more than 10 seconds quicker than its brother, the E63 S sedan.