The Merc CLK 63 AMG Black is a Top Gear hero: "it’s straightforward and real"

Are you, like this 2008 car, passing your 17th birthday? Time to get a driving licence. Congratulations. As a prevocal toddler you wouldn’t have been aware that for the first two years of your life the world had been in a financial crisis that had seen millions thrown out of their homes or lose their savings, as 45 per cent of global wealth was destroyed.

Top Gear’s second century of magazines ended in January 2010, so the latter part of that era was pretty frosty for the car biz. Since then the world seems to have lurched from one crisis to the next. So here’s a car from a simpler and sunnier time before all that. Mercedes-Benz CLK 63 AMG Black Series is a complex name for a straightforward car. The spec seems charmingly naive from a 2025 point of view. A heroic 6.2-litre naturally aspirated V8. Only two wheels steering, and only two – a different two – driving. There are no sport or mode buttons.

The suspension is spanner adjustable, not adaptive. The LSD is mechanical. There’s not even a halfway ‘sport’ calibration for the ESP, but just on or off. As simple a choice as life and death.

Photography: Jonny Fleetwood

The CLK 63 was one of the early applications for the M156, AMG’s first ground up engine. Another less noble one was the R63 minivan but let’s skate over that. The Black Series version of the CLK 63 has an uprated 507bhp, but that pales into insignificance alongside the distended bodywork and chassis braces. They served a thoroughly gone over chassis – wider track, lower ride, stiffer springs and 285/30 rear tyres on 19in wheels. The back seat is gone, the front ones are fixed back race jobs and the front wings are plastic.

It was £100k back then, same as a 911 GT3 RS was. Find one now and it’ll still be that price, so it won’t have depreciated, merely lost to inflation. This one is probably worth more, on account of the rumour that it was owned by Jeremy Clarkson. Good choice, sir. The behaviour and engineering are sophisticated but the concept, by today’s standards, is refreshingly simple.

If future archaeologists need to date it, they’ll find a clue in the glovebox: a 30-pin iPhone plug. The satnav is like Teletext, and even though the screen resides among its own hailstorm of little buttons because it isn’t touch sensitive, the rest of the car is, by today’s standards, light on controls. You’ve no radar cruise or lane keeping or speed limit bonger. These you don’t miss.

It doesn’t need surround cameras because, wide arches or not, it’s small and glassy, easy to see out of and to thread down narrow roads. Cars now are too fat. Right, our route. One thing hasn’t changed in 17 years – Top Gear can’t resist a muttonheaded pun. So the start point is a truckstop in Inverness by the name of Cafe V8. Ba-da-boom. Full Scottish breakfast sunk, I take a quick look at the city’s Kessock Bridge before turning south along the boring A9. Not for long. Left towards Grantown on Spey, then I follow the Old Military Road.

That’s the A939 and A93 right over the Cairngorms. Some is single track, but most is intoxicatingly open, full of every kind of corner and 3D challenge. The views are spectacular, and other traffic eerily and magically sparse. This day is all that your driving dreams ever dreamt.

Start the AMG engine and its voice is stern, but it doesn’t have a juvenile loud exhaust button, no false explosions down the tailpipes. It’s straightforward and real. Twitch your foot and propulsion happens, in exact proportion to the magnitude of the twitch. In that way it’s like an EV, oddly, rather than like the indecisive turbo PHEVs we’ve spent too long kidding ourselves we can get used to. There’s torque enough but not an overabundance, because it invites you to use the revs. This engine has a character all of its own – not the rumble of the 5.5 supercharged AMG that preceded it, nor the screaming revs of a flat crank job.

There’s a dignity to its texture, a reflection of the honest, precise potency of the output. So pick your gear and pick your revs, and your foot knows exactly what it’ll get. I’m using the big aluminium paddles. It’s a seven speed autobox but widely spaced in the Mercedes manner, so for today it’s a simple choice of second, third or fourth.

It’s not as fast as you might be imagining. And that’s OK. More than OK actually. I love cars where you can feel the engine working, keeping your foot pinned down. Flooring a 2025 supercar is standing on hot coals, or, more literally for the EVs, grasping a bare high voltage wire. You might do it for a challenge but it’s just an instant and honestly how enjoyable is it? In this AMG, it’s less intense but still a proper high, and it lasts longer.

Sawing through the revs, leaning on the tyres, picking my line, squeezing the brakes. All the synapses are tingling

Besides, it still has more power than the rear tyres quite know what to do with, at least much of the time. Time that includes when you’re in any real corner, when you’re in the low gears even going straight, any and all the time if it’s wet. The traction control, even when activated, has a laissez faire attitude. This rear drive design is right at the core of the car, and it’s matched by bewitching clarity and tidiness. You know how much grip and traction you have left, and when they’re gone it’s faithful. No doubt you could have fun shredding the tyres on a track, but this trip is about holding the car just inside its capacity, working with every change in surface, every dip and crest.

Yet the ride is remarkably pliant. It might have been called hardcore at the time, but surely not now. Mostly the body control is taut and resolute, but actually at times, especially as the road swings around and over drumlins – a lovely Scottish word for the egg shaped hillocks left by melted glaciers – there’s a little float. It’s adjustable hardware though, and I might be tempted to get out the socket set and just clench down the dampers a little.

Mind you, a general stiffening of suspension and hardening of ride is a trend that’s been going on for pretty much ever. All old cars feel a little soft, more floaty and less grippy than now. For context, I drove to Inverness in the Cupra Tavascan two motor EV. It has similar grip and out of corner shove as the AMG. That’s 18 years of ‘progress’ right there. It goes further on a battery than the 14mpg AMG goes on a tank.

And there are now more rapid charge stations along today’s route than petrol stations. But I needn’t tell you an EV crossover doesn’t supply AMG Black Series sensations or emotions.

Around the time the Black Series launched, I rode in a prototype Tesla Roadster. It was clear that was the beginning of something big, but I had no idea how big. A lot was going on as Top Gear neared its 200th issue. BMW had shown the Vision EfficientDynamics that became the i8 and in Porsche’s workshops, the team had nearly finished the 918 concept. The world grew more complicated as it simultaneously grew darker.

In 2009 GM – which at the time owned Vauxhall, Opel and Saab – went bankrupt for a while. Chrysler/Dodge/Jeep too, until it was bought up by Fiat. Ford only narrowly averted it, having lately disbanded its Premier Automotive Group by selling Volvo to the Chinese and JLR to Indian buyers. Honda and Toyota pulled out of F1 and Toyota made its first ever loss. Subaru was absent from WRC. Upcoming new cars, including some delightful sports cars that we’d already seen as concepts, were canned and whole factories closed. It all happened because financiers had dreamed up increasingly Byzantine money invention schemes that it turned out they themselves didn’t understand.

Yet until they blew up, we’d never heard of those schemes, so the world pre-2008 looks from today’s perspective like a simpler, more honest place. The car I’m driving comes from the same year as the first generation iPhone. Doomscrolling and memecoin lay in our mercifully distant futures.

In 2025, driving a car launched before connectivity and endless ADAS, before electrification and complication, can be a solitary bliss. So on I go, sawing through the revs, leaning on the tyres, picking my line, squeezing the brakes. All the synapses are tingling. This car crackles with character and yet, in communicating the road, it’s transparent as air. What a fabulously special thing. Excuse me while I have one of those days. Car, road, scenery and weather, in a hypnotically focused harmony.

Mercedes CLK 63 AMG Black Series

Price new/now: £99,517/£110,000 
Powertrain: 6208cc nat asp V8, 507bhp, 464lb ft
Transmission: 7spd auto, RWD
Performance: 0–62mph in 4.2secs, 188mph
Economy: 18.5mpg, 369g/km CO2
Weight: 1,760kg