Year of manufacture 1998 Recorded mileage 48,135 Asking price £49,950 Vendor SL Shop, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire; 01789 337070; theslshop.com WHEN IT WAS NEW Price DM223,648 Max power 376bhp Max torque 428lb ft 0-62mph 5.8 secs Top speed 155mph Mpg 14.7
Undercover performance. There’s nothing quite like it. And here we have an excellent example from before the days when AMG was officially part of Mercedes-Benz. Hans Werner Aufrecht and Erhard Melcher had been fettling the marque’s output for decades, first in-house and then independently, often with fantastic results. Mercedes and AMG began working together in the late ’80s, and from 1990 AMG’s products could be sold in Mercedes’ dealerships. In 1999, DaimlerChrysler AG, as it was then, took a controlling stake in AMG, and in 2005 took it over completely.
This SL60, therefore, is from AMG’s quasi-skunkworks period, authorised but not official, working in the shadows but releasing potent creations. Mercedes hasn’t documented how many were built, but the number to have left the factory between September 1993 and May 1998 wasn’t in the tens of thousands. Powered by a 376bhp, 6-litre M119 double-overhead-cam, light-alloy V8 that also has 428lb ft of torque at just 3750rpm, there’s nothing subtle about its big-hearted performance. But the real thrill is that it doesn’t shout about it. Well, unless you floor it and hear the eight-cylinder bellow, but with just its light-alloy AMG wheels and the merest hint of a bodykit, unless you clock the bootlid badging you could be none the wiser.
According to this car’s vendor, marque specialist SL Shop, there were just 49 right-hand-drive models produced, making this apparently much-loved example quite a find. It has been with its curr
