Performance COTY

Mercedes-AMG C63 S Coupe: Performance Car of the Year 2017 #6

Affalterbach’s unhinged missile fires into muscle-car territory

03 Mar 2017 1:32 PM

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Let’s not kid each other here. The AMG C63 S Coupe is not about wafting you and your significant other down to the opera house in silence.

Nor is it about lurking in the shadows and just being a watcher. Nope, this is a genuine muscle car that just happens to have a high-end Euro badge on its rump. It’s about as subtle as a Trump tweet. But in a good way.

Of course, you can make up your own mind about that, and from the best seat in the house, you can’t see what it looks like anyway. It’s also from the helm you discover what a head-kicker the AMG really is. There is acceleration and then there is the stuff the C63 S produces. Call it thrust, call it grunt, call it what you like – this is a serious piece of hardware. And covering big distances with zip fuss is the name of the game.

And keeping things as firm as they are also allows for pretty neat, sorted handling. And so it is, but the C63 S has one more trick up its sleeve in that department. With a wider rear axle than cooking C-Class cars and torque vectoring built into that drive axle, the AMG is a truly amazing thing to punt hard. Turn it in and it feels completely normal with good steering feedback and a solid feel. But feed the power in post-apex and the car starts to tighten its line.