Mercedes-AMG C63 S Saloon 2018 first drive

Here they’re accompanied by a trio of new AMG-specific controls fitted into the lower orbits of the steering wheel; a new rotary knob bottom on the right to select your chosen drive mode (or, in ESP-off mode, your chosen traction control level) and a couple of toggle buttons placed conveniently for your left thumb whose function can be set (exhaust mode, gearbox mode, etc) according to your own preference. The car’s cabin remains a fantastic advert for it, and Mercedes’ digital instruments are just the tech-rich tonic it needed to maintain a lead over its competitors for luxury ambience and perceived quality.

There’s another rather good advert for the C63 S saloon under the bonnet: a throbbing Rickenbacker of a V8 whose bassy thrug would take an awfully long time to go sour on your eardrums. It responds so crisply and revs so evenly and keenly that you’d never guess it was turbocharged, either.

That’s not accounting for the torque, of course. Only turbocharging could produce such a swell of mid-range urge as the C63 S can summon up. Between that and the silken savagery on tap at the top end of the engine’s rev range, this AMG’s stature as the true hot-rod of its class is utterly beyond question. Want the best engine available in a sub-£80k fast four-door? The C63 S is what you buy. I will brook no argument on the subject.

Does Mercedes’ new nine-speed gearbox bring more of the brilliance of that V8 to bear than the old seven-speeder managed, though? It depends how you drive. Shift speed and quality has certainly improved in the car’s sportier driving programs, and if you treat an empty winding A-road as invitation to dial up ‘manual’ mode, effectively retiring every ratio above fifth, you can easily convince yourself that some decent progress has been made. There’s certainly nothing wrong with the way the gearbox copes with hard track use, or the urgency with which it can batter its way down through the intermediate ratios when you want it to.

Where the transmission struggles to convince is at that middling ground-covering pace, when left to juggle ratios by itself. Even in Sport and Sport+ driving modes it tends to upshift too far by a gear or two, and simply gives itself too much to do to find the perfect ratio for the bend or overtake you’re lining up, making responses to bigger accelerator applications seem just a touch clumsy and slow. That is true, mind you, not only of the C63 S’s gearbox but also just about every other eight, nine or ten-speed modern automatic gearbox you could mention, so we won’t dwell on it.

Affalterbach isn’t shouting too loudly about the suspension revisions it has made to the C63, I suspect for strategic reasons. If it was widely known that the firm had allowed its 503bhp thunder-saloon to go slightly soft in advancing age, perhaps some people wouldn’t buy one. But the truth is, a dose of dynamic realism hasn’t harmed the C63 one jot.

The car wasn’t actually the firmest, sharpest or dartiest of handlers before, and the change has been sufficiently subtly executed that few moving from the old Mercedes-AMG C 63 to the new one will even notice it. But the signs are there. You can now use Sport and Sport+ driving modes on the road, allowing for the firmer damping they impose, without any unpalatable compromise on bump absorption or ride composure. I’d say the C63 S has certainly become a better fast road car as a result.

It steers with perfectly judged, intuitive pace and weight, just as the last one did. It doesn’t have Giulia Quadrifoglio-level agility or body control, rolling a touch more heavily when cornering hard than some might like. But does it ever handle sweetly. It stays composed over bumps and grips more than hard enough to take its ambitions as a precision instrument really seriously. But then, with the aids deactivated, it slips so progressively into power-oversteer that’s so wonderfully, addictively controllable and benign that you feel like bathing in it.

This is the kind of oversteer you don’t just ride out, but grab another gear as it develops just to prolong the indulgence. And now, if you want to tap into just a bit of that oversteer but leave a distant electronic safety net in place to help tidy things up when your exuberance gets the better of you, go ahead sir; that’s the difference that new traction control system makes. In its most dialled-down settings ('9’ is off, and I liked ‘7’ and ‘8’ best), it’s a hugely permissive but still reassuring presence.