Iron Fist: Mercedes-AMG’s Hatch King A 45 S Tested
Just Like a Race Car
There’s hardly any lean and it feels just like a race car. In every respect. Packing frequency-selective adaptive dampers, high performance coil springs and three-mode AMG Ride Control, this AMG corners hard enough to make you brace your neck as it takes extreme hatchback motoring next level. And you can play Nürburgring 24 Hour too. Those Sport Pilots simply don’t drop off, either.
And did someone say Drift Mode? Drift Mode! If you ever tire of chasing tenths of a second every lap, Drift Mode replaces the go with a little show at the prod of a button. Select both Race and Drift to shift the AWD bias rearmost and once you have the hang of it, A 45 S becomes a drift tool of note. Oh yes — when you pick Race mode, the car’s exhaust tone becomes considerably gruffer with pops, bangs and all. Just to add effect!
A 45 S likes to stop too — its brakes love to be abused. Jump on them way beyond your comfortable markers on track and still A 45 S retards splendidly. The punch holes in the ventilated and perforated 14.1 by 1,4-inch front discs whir under the severe clamping pressure of their 6-piston monobloc fixed front calipers. Them and 12.6 x .08-inch rear rotors in single-pot floating calipers slow the car supremely and consistently. Without a trace of fade.
Peerless Performance Hatch
So, there’s no doubt that as an extreme performance hatch, this car is currently peerless. It has a few foibles off the boil though. Short on low down grunt, it relies on its gearbox to shift down quickly. But the ‘box tends to freak out while accelerating in comfort mode in normal driving. It finds the wrong gear, prompting a paddle shift to something that made sense.
And while AMG promises that ride comfort has been improved over the previous model, that makes us wonder if we’ve forgotten how harsh that car must have been? Let’s just say that this car is honest about what it drives over. It’s direct, brutal set-up is ever-present, even in its most basic comfort mode. There it still rides well enough. To satisfy some of the people some of the time. Not all the people all of the time….
Of course, the Mercedes-AMG A45 S has cool cockpit to offset its W12-like ride (that’s Lewis’ weekend wheels, by the way). Complete with the ultimate man to machine interface, Merc’s impeccable Starship Enterprise instrumentation and MBUX infotainment crosses the dash to deliver a choice of Classic, Sport and particularly striking Supersport modes. Supersport even works with My Mercedes’ Track Pace virtual race engineer data logger to hone your own driving skills.