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Consider the Red Pig dead, her carcass ground up to sell yet another length of sausage. The AMG Sport line, intended as a gap between standard road-going Mercedes-Benz and the truly special things from AMG, has now been erased. Read: You won’t be able to buy an AMG Sport anymore, just a softer version of an Mercedes-AMG. The C63, for instance, with be joined by a C43, the latter bearing a mass-produced twin-turbo V6. It’s the end of an era, and they’re going to make a killing.
One man, one engine. This motto was once the watchword of AMG. The company started out building sledgehammers like the 300 SEL 6.8, the first in a long line of semi-medieval automotive weaponry favoring brute force over delicacy. You knew what you were getting with an AMG, something that sounded like an Allosaur on bath salts and left a tire destruction trail worthy of the German lunatics who made it. Pop the hood, and you’d find the signature of a master technician inscribed with pride. There was the sense that the badge on the fender wasn’t just a jumble of corporate buzzwords, but genuine craftsmanship. It was wonderful.
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It’s difficult to talk about purity without sounding pretentious, but AMG has always felt like an enterprise with autonomy, not just a flavor of Mercedes. Now, the true-blue C63 and E63 dreadnaughts will co-mingle with the C43, E43, and current SLC43 coupe, all of which use Merc’s twin-turbo V6. They’ll likely be far faster than AMG’s older offerings, and have carefully tuned soundtracks with programmed-in throttle overrun. The “43” designation doesn’t actually have anything to do with displacement (the V6 is a 3-liter unit), but neither does the “63.” Both are merely callbacks to the past, a past that fades as profits rise.