When Mercedes do hot hatch, they
don’t mess about. 360 PS? Audi and BMW are old hands at this, but can they live
with the rabid A45 AMG?
It felt like yesterday: same roads, same
routes, same silly speeds. We used to be driving ourselves dizzy up here in
trick Mitsubishi Lancer Evos and Subaru Imprezas on steroids, relatively
affordable fast cars that loomed large inside our heads and on our bedroom
walls. Ten years on, however, the once untouchable four-door Japanese
bat-mobiles are about as en vogue as a Nokia 3110 mobile phone or Rio MP3
player. Instead, the compact crackerjacks most petrol-heads embrace in 2013
still can be had with four doors, four-wheel-drive and turbocharged
four-cylinder engines, but they are no longer street-legal derivatives of
rally-bred icons made in the Far East.
Merc
A45 AMG front
It’s Deutschland über Alles these days,
premium eclipsing mainstream, Freude durch Kraft dressed up in more socially
acceptable formats. Offering a similar mix of exciting dynamics, engineering
excellence and fire-breathing performance, the latest masters of the super-GTI
segment are the 300-PS Audi S3, the 320-PS BMW M135i and the new (and utterly
rampant) 360-PS Mercedes A45 AMG. Gentlemen, start your engines for a two-day,
no-holds-barred shootout on the Dolomites’ finest tire-shredding, brake-eating
turf.
Normally in June, all passes connecting
Italy to Austria and Switzerland are open, but since this spring is an autumn which
has been pulled forward, evidently erasing summer in the process, we had
virtually the entire Alps to ourselves. Wherever a sign read ‘Road closed due
to snow’, there was 25-30 kilometers of virtually traffic-free dream territory
lying ahead. Add to this a felt 80 kilometers of visibility and you’re on the
threshold of driver’s paradise. It’s the perfect place to showcase just how
much the hot hatch has changed: in 1976 the first VW Golf GTI had 110 PS, the
new Mk7 GTI has 220 PS; but now this mad AMG Merc has 360 PS.
Audi
S3 front
To turn this torque punch into a mighty
kick in the butt, Mercedes have mated its reinforced seven-speed twin-clutch
transmission to an aggressively tuned 4Matic driveline. The software of the
Speedshift ’box is borrowed from the SLS AMG GT, which is why the sportiest
A-Class features a computer-generated heel-and-toe downshift action, a
Racestart function and, in ‘Manual’ and ‘Sport’ settings, the same ultra-quick
shifts as the flagship gull-wing supercar. In C (for Controlled Efficiency),
Friends of the Earth may relish start/stop and super-smooth gear changes at low
revs. In S, the same process is repeated at a brisker pace. In M, you play the
paddle piano, so don’t expect the black box to help out when the needle of the rev
counter suddenly hits its 6,250-RPM limit. But the transmission will not accept
early downshift orders. It will only shift down when it reckons that the
revolutions are evenly matched, which definitely takes too long on the fast
approach to a slow bend. It’s a fault that afflicts every AMG, from A45 to SLS,
to varying degrees.
Did the SLS-inspired A45 AMG convince us
with a rapid-fire throttle response? Yes and no. In combination with the new
sports exhaust (with a continuously adjustable flap pinched from the SLK55 AMG)
the twin-scroll turbo (which runs at a high 1.8 bar) swings the whip hard and
early and when you’re deep in the rev range there’s no issue with throttle
response. But it’s the ’box which can undermine this effort by sometimes
pre-selecting the wrong ratio, by taking a little too long to make up its
electronic mind now and then and by occasionally triggering a
counter-productive upshift. A software issue, perhaps, but one that needs
addressing.
BMW
M1351 front
On a different front, the AMG computer
chips do a splendid job relaying a hackle-raising sensation of speed. By
momentarily retarding ignition and injection, they make lead-footed all-out
upshifts bark as angrily as the SLS’ V8, they voice an angry blat-blat during
downshifts and they telegraph a catchy cocktail of ’charger whine and
waste-gate whistle into the cabin. It’s artificial, but rather nice. And
there’s bite to match the bark: with Racestart active, this 1,480-kg A-Class
will howl in 4.6 seconds from 0 to 100 km/h, officially return around 14.16
km/liter and if you spend a small fortune on the AMG Driver’s Pack, the top
speed rises from 250 to 272 km/h, which almost equals the engine’s cut-out
speed. It doesn’t feel as manically fast as the most extreme Evos and Scoobys of
old or gap the Audi and BMW with quite the ease you’d expect, but there’s no
doubting the punch of that little four-pot.
The engine delivers quantifiable extra urge
with real authority, the steering fuses input and feedback to a wonderfully
three-dimensional level of control, the four-wheel drive distributes torque
with the eerie professionalism of a poker ace dealing his rounds and the brakes
bite with vigor and determination until, at the foot of the pass, smoke signals
beg for mercy. The A45 AMG is as checkable as it is sure-footed. It can corner
on three wheels, decelerate at a ridiculous yaw angle and put the power down
even earlier than the Audi.