Daft question, but how does it compare to the GTR?
Your question is a good one, the SLK and GT are similar in many ways, both are incredibly quick two-seat, open-top, “front” engined, forced-induction, V8, AMG roadsters, and you can really feel those similarities when driving the cars slowly or when cruising.
However the moment you start using even just a touch of either car’s performance the difference between them becomes much clearer to see, hear and feel, and the gap widens the quicker you go - or rather, the more of the performance you choose to use.
The GT is much much more capable, ultimately much quicker as it translates the power to motion much more effectively. It has much wider tyres, much smarter technology and a much faster gearbox. It also stays flat, almost completely flat when cornering, accelerating or braking hard.
The term “different league” doesn’t do justice to the difference in torsional stiffness between the SLK and GT. The GT feels like it has been hewn from a solid piece of aluminium, whereas the SLK feels like an 18 year old sports car which is part of the SLK’s character.
The GT is a huge car, but as the speed picks up it shrinks around you and is so easy to place on the road when driving quickly. What it cannot do is become narrow when passing traffic and so making progress on B roads means you’re at times uncomfortably close to other cars.
One of the SLK’s Top Trumps is that it is absolutely tiny is comparison. Despite that, it’s harder to place on the road when pushing on, but is much easier to drive on narrow roads, and so it can be used for different types of trips and means that it can be used more often.
It’s other Top Trump is that the SLK is much rarer - and some would say more special - than the GT, but nobody would know, even Mercedes super fans. It looks like an SLK with a particularly nice stance (but that’s very subtle) and with a ridiculously loud exhaust (which not so subtle).
Both cars feel special and characterful but in completely different ways. The SLK comes from towards the very end of an era when even expensive cars were imperfect - which to many gives them more character - and such incredible amounts of power demanded respect from the driver.
Yesterday I took my daughter to a job interview in the SLK - it was a beautiful, warm and dry day and there was a stretch of road which is arrow straight with excellent sight lines, so I gave it a few very gentle prods of the accelerator and each time exclaimed how brutal the performance is.
My daughter said you just don’t feel like you’re being pushed back in the seat like you do in the GT, and that probably sums up the two cars bets of all. The GT’s platform is so capable that it is a match for the power of the engine, and so you can extract more performance more of the time.
Whereas in the SLK, the engine dominates everything else about the car. The engine and it’s power delivery is so brutal that the platform is holding on tight, just like the driver, and so the opportunity to actually deploy even most of the available power is very very rare.
One was engineered to be a supercar and the king of the (Nurburg) ring, and the other was a sporty car tuned to extreme lengths to embarrass the supercars of a decade earlier. So two very similar cars in objective terms, but subjectively they are completely different in character.
