/ 29 April 2008

McDreamy or McSteamy?

For the two people reading this who might not have watched Grey’s Anatomy, McDreamy and McSteamy are two very desirable but completely different surgeons in the TV serial which practically everyone on the planet who owns a TV has become addicted to.

McDreamy is the responsible, sensitive, take-home-to-meet-your-parents kind of guy, while McSteamy is an unreliable, selfish and achingly delectable bad guy you don’t ever admit to being attracted to.

During dinner with a few girlfriends recently I asked who they preferred and predictably most opted for the naffy McDreamy because he was marriage material, but there were one or two who chose the philandering McSteamy because he was the more exciting option. At the end of dinner we sullenly wondered why it wasn’t possible to have both — a steamy yet faithful guy — and ultimately realised we had had a few too many cocktails and were better off wondering how Eskom’s useless head honchos escape public lynchings.

Of course, being a motoring journo, I started wondering if it might be possible to have the best of both worlds in one car — a mix of exhilarating sportiness, reliability and comfort. If you’ve driven a few cars, you’ll know that really sporty cars have the kind of hard suspension that ensures you’ll need multiple organ transplants after a few months and comfortable cars have the agility of bread and butter puddings in the twisty sections.

So asking for a McPerfect car is a tall order.

Not too tall an order for Mercedes-Benz AMG, though, which has come up with a car that is as close as dammit to a McPerfect car: the C-Class C63 AMG.

We arrived in Bloemfontein on a cold, rain-soaked day, but we immediately perked up when we caught sight of the fleet of C63s waiting for us at the entrance to the airport.

The drive to the Phakisa raceway, which is about 170km from the airport, happened in an unnaturally short time as we battled to keep the car at legal speeds. Heck, who am I fooling here? We all know that with a 6,3-litre V8 powerhouse pushing 336kW of power and 600Nm of torque, we were battling to keep it at a speed for which we wouldn’t immediately be thrown into jail … if we were caught.

The C63 catapults you slightly into the future every time you tramp the accelerator and the steroid-fed horses under the bonnet are only too eager to gallop away from you. Put the car into sport mode and the throttle-blip intensifies an already scary engine note.

Cruising on B-roads was as comfortable as it could possibly be and when we started throwing the C63 around the track, we discovered that the sport setting was quite sensitive to throttle input and took a little while to get used to.

The C63 sticks to the tar as though the tyres have nano glue particles in them and the overall performance will make you look like a much better driver than you actually are.

There is an alphabet soup of standard features and if you pay R52 000 for the performance package, you will get composite brakes and rear-­passenger side airbags, among other things.

I haven’t driven the BMW M3 yet, but it will have to be spectacular to trump the C63 (R699 000), which for now is the new king of the road.