Hammering Along Roads in High Style
Last week: The Senate approved a measure that could allow rural interstate speed limits of 65 m.p.h.
Today: Andy Cohen, president of Beverly Hills Motoring Accessories, will introduce an AMG-Mercedes Wunderwagen crossbred for intergalactic speeds of 186 m.p.h.
Cohen hopes the two events are connected. The Highway Patrol hopes he’s kidding.
For this AMG-Mercedes wasn’t named Hammer because the word is bilingual--hammer is hammer in German and English--but because it can be cocked for bullet speeds. It is driven by a bad 360-horsepower V-8 engine--once the choice of the Afrika Korps. At road speeds of Mach .20, seat belts are mandatory--but cargo nets are preferred.
“It is the fastest passenger sedan in history,” Cohen said. “It shifts from third to fourth at 145 m.p.h. It doesn’t come as a five-speed because there isn’t a gearbox that will take that much torque.”
And all this from docile family wheels that will purr along surface streets to Vons with uncommon quiet (listening to Wagner at 160 m.p.h. is a factory recommended devilment) and comfort. It doesn’t even look that much different from the Mercedes 300E it used to be. A wolf in Gucci lederhosen, Cohen said.
This car--the only one in the country--arrived in California three weeks ago. It was that scarlet blur (driven by a factory chaperon) whistling down Interstate 5 from San Francisco.
Since then, there have been hoo-boy runs along desert interstates. Road & Track magazine took the Hammer to its top end at Pomona Raceway.
And as is spoken by that milquetoast in the TV commercials for the wimpy Pontiacs: Let Me Tell Ya.
I powered from dead stop entering the Santa Monica Freeway and was the quickest thing in the fast lane in four seconds.
On this performance planet, at a velocity of 100 yards a second, vision must be fisheye with laser precision. To stray, to have less than absolute control of the Hammer is to sense the fatalism a bug knows just before smiting a windshield.
Such transformation of masterpiece motor cars to high-tech hot rods is performed by AMG of Germany.
These are the Tuneup Burgermeisters who have spent more years perfecting the technik than developing the optik of performance motoring.
With the Hammer, that means dismantling a perfectly good Mercedes and bolting aboard a new engine, tougher drive train, stiffer chassis, firmer suspension and bigger wheels.
No chrome is left undone. “When it arrived even the wheels were body color,” Cohen said. “Too blah. I had ‘em rechromed. AMG probably will complain about those Southern California crazies again.”
Talking of crazies, who but the loosely wrapped would want to drive this close to their limits? Who invests $167,000 on a death wish?
“Well, in Germany the magic number is 300,” Cohen said. “That’s 300 kilometers per hour, about 180 m.p.h., and Hammer is the only four-passenger car that can do it.”
What of California, where hyperambitious peace officers even buy their own radar?
“There always are people who want the fastest, the biggest and the best. The fastest racehorse, plane and sailboat. I look at the Hammer as a car that costs the same as a Rolls-Royce Corniche convertible and that’s a piece of junk.”
See here, sir!
“Well . . . maybe an old-fashioned, ill-handling, heavy status symbol.”
Cohen--whose car boutique supplied a Jeep cover that was President Reagan’s birthday gift from his staff--is West Coast representative of AMG of North America.
AMG’s plant in Westmont, Ill., is the remanufacturing point for domestic Hammers.
Who said you can’t build a decent car in America?
The AMG Hammer will be on one-day display today at Beverly Hills Motoring Accessories, 209 S. Robertson Blvd., 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
