Mercedes-Benz SL 65 AMG Black Series: Track Test Review

My palms are gripping the suede-wrapped steering wheel. Stability control is off. The speedometer reads 300 km/h, and sweat is forming on my forehead. The grey coupe is bouncing down the high-speed test track like a startled hare, and what started as thrilling curiosity — how quickly would we hit the 320 km/h speed limiter? — has become something simpler, and more primal: fear. I expected the Mercedes-Benz SL 65 AMG Black Series to be the ultimate expression of this iconic roadster. But somewhere along the way, something went wrong.

The proving ground’s long straight offers little forgiveness — and nowhere to hide.

The Black Series Philosophy: Track Focus Over Raw Power

In the early 2000s, Mercedes-Benz began developing two distinct branches of high-performance variants. One path produced powerful yet road-oriented AMG models. The other gave birth to the Black Series — a line aimed squarely at the track and the purist driver.

The name was borrowed from the banking world, where a black credit card outranks gold and platinum. And the priorities of the Black Series follow a similar logic: it’s not about peak horsepower figures, it’s about:

Chassis tuning and precision over sheer grunt
Maximum weight reduction by any means necessary
Track-ready hardware adapted for road use

The first Black Series model arrived at the end of 2006 — the SLK 55 AMG Black Series, a former roadster that had traded its folding metal roof for a fixed carbon fibre hardtop. Dealerships reportedly had to throw away the standard folding roof mechanism that came in the boot.

A badge that promised something different from the moment it first appeared on a showroom floor.

A Brief History of the Black Series Lineup

A year later came the CLK 63 AMG Black Series — a car that earned genuine enthusiasm from road testers of the era. It was an honest, emotional, and precise sports car that felt out of place in the typical Mercedes lineup, even with the AMG badge. Arndt Maier, the chief chassis tuning specialist behind the AMG Black Series cars, considered the CLK his personal favourite — despite also having worked on the C 63 AMG Coupe Black Series and the SLS AMG Black Series. His final project at Mercedes was the electric SLS. After that, it’s no surprise he moved to BMW’s M division.

Did Maier’s hands shape the SL R230 Black Series? Unfortunately, no.

The CLK 63 AMG Black Series set a benchmark that every successor quietly competed with — whether it admitted it or not.

The SL R230: An Unlikely Starting Point

The R230-generation SL roadster has always held a place on my personal shortlist of the greatest cars ever made. Both the SL 600 — with its almost electric-car-like surge of torque — and the SL 55 AMG, capable of delivering every flavour of petrolhead satisfaction, are outstanding machines. Could you make something already this good even better? In theory, the SL 65 AMG Black Series should have been the answer. But this is the only Black Series car with a twelve-cylinder engine, and it wasn’t developed at AMG.

Beneath the R230’s skin lies a platform designed for grand touring comfort. The Black Series had other ideas.

Meet the Real Builder: HWA

In the interest of historical accuracy, this car probably deserves a different badge entirely: SL 65 HWA.

HWA stands for Hans-Werner Aufrecht — one of the co-founders of AMG. After AMG was absorbed by Mercedes-Benz, Aufrecht didn’t retire. Instead, he founded HWA AG and continued building racing cars wearing the three-pointed star. From 1998, HWA constructed championship-winning DTM machines for drivers including Bernd Schneider, Gary Paffett, and Paul di Resta. The company also developed:

The SLS GT3 customer racing coupé
The CLA 45 AMG Racing Series
The hugely successful Mercedes-AMG GT3 and GT4 competition coupés

And it was at the HWA factory in Affalterbach that all 350 examples of the SL 65 AMG Black Series were hand-assembled.

Affalterbach is also home to AMG, but the facility where the Black Series was born answers to a different name.

What the Black Series Treatment Actually Means for the SL

As with the SLK before it, the folding metal roof was replaced by a fixed carbon fibre hardtop — and along with the roof went many of the technologies that made the standard SL so special.

What was removed or replaced:

The SBC electro-hydraulic brake booster — arguably a welcome deletion, given its known issues
The ABC (Active Body Control) hydraulic suspension, replaced by KW coilover units
The standard anti-roll bars, replaced by massively thick front and rear sway bars
Much of the sound deadening

Look underneath and you’ll find hardware that wouldn’t be out of place on a DTM grid. The question is whether the road ever agreed to play along.

What was added:

Remote-reservoir dampers at each corner
Solid spherical joints throughout the suspension
An oil cooler mounted face-down behind the front splitter
Dual rear differential coolers (the rear diff features a locking mechanism)
Massive carbon fibre front wings to cover the 19-inch wheels wearing 265mm Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 tyres

That ABC suspension deserves a special word of mourning. The hydraulic system — pump, reservoir, lines, and actuators — weighs around 50 kg, but it’s responsible for the lion’s share of what makes a standard SL feel special. It’s simultaneously absorbent over rough surfaces and razor-sharp through corners, all without a single anti-roll bar. Replacing it with coilovers and sway bars may look good on a spec sheet, but it fundamentally changes the character of the car.

The Black Series is also 15 cm wider than a standard SL 65 AMG. One wonders whether the team at HWA was occasionally reminded they were building a road car rather than another DTM machine.

Those wide arches aren’t just visual theatre — 15 centimetres of extra width had to go somewhere.

The Engine: 670 hp of Biturbo V12

Under the long carbon bonnet sits the M275 biturbo V12 — the same unit found in the standard SL 600, but here treated to revised turbochargers, reworked intake, and a new exhaust system.

Key powertrain figures:

670 hp (up significantly over the standard car)
1,000 Nm of torque (limited by the five-speed automatic gearbox)
Gearbox: five-speed automatic — fourth gear runs all the way to 280 km/h
Engine revs freely to 6,000 rpm

The engine wakes up with surprising gentleness — far more muted than the thunderous AMG V8s from the same era. Inside, if it weren’t for the optional fixed-back bucket seats, you’d struggle to tell this wasn’t a standard SL. Climate control, a proper audio system, and — in a nice touch — carbon fibre door inserts and a numbered plaque on the centre console. Call it carbon fibre hedonism.

Kerb weight comes in at 1,880 kg — a substantial 240 kg less than the standard SL 65 AMG, but still no lightweight by modern standards.

Twelve cylinders, two turbochargers, and a gearbox doing its best to keep everything in check.

On the Road: Every Pothole Feels Personal

From the very first metres, it’s clear that the weight savings didn’t stop at body panels and roof mechanisms. The sound deadening is essentially gone. Every grain of grit on the road seems to find its way into the cabin; every crack in the tarmac transmits directly into your spine. I instinctively scanned the centre console for damper adjustment — and found nothing except the manual gearbox mode buttons.

This is likely the stiffest road car I have ever driven. The SL 65 AMG Black Series could double as a quality-control tool for freshly laid asphalt — it will find every flaw. On the pitted access roads of the test facility, it was, at times, genuinely unpleasant.

The kind of road surface the SL 65 Black Series will catalogue in forensic detail, whether you ask it to or not.

Performance Numbers: Rapid, But With Caveats

The Michelin Pilot Sport Cup 2 tyres, even when warm, simply cannot contain 1,000 Nm from a standstill. A half-throttle launch still produces wheelspin:

0–100 km/h: 4.14 seconds (claimed 3.8 s — achieving that would require destroying the tyres)
0–200 km/h: 11.2 seconds
Top speed achieved: 318.2 km/h (limiter set at 320 km/h)

The 100–200 km/h sprint of around 7 seconds might not sound dramatic by modern standards — cars like the BMW M340i can match it — but where the Black Series truly distinguishes itself is above 250 km/h, where it doesn’t slow down. It just keeps pulling, straight through 300 km/h, with no drama and no hesitation.

By the third high-speed run I had grown accustomed to the vibration well enough to keep my foot pinned. But the margins felt very narrow, and the car added a few grey hairs to my collection. This is emphatically not an autobahn cruiser. I can easily picture a wealthy driver climbing into a Porsche 911 Turbo S and effortlessly covering 200 fast kilometres to the office. The same journey in this SL would feel like a working shift.

The speed itself was never really in question. It was everything that came with it.

Handling: Impressive Pace, Frustrating Balance

Here’s where the real disappointment lies. With stock alignment settings and the standard coilover setup, the SL 65 AMG Black Series exhibits a persistent and stubborn understeer that undermines confidence on a demanding circuit.

The handling characteristics, honestly assessed:

Steering feel: acceptable weight, but too much dead zone around centre
Turn-in: reluctant; the nose pushes wide almost every time
Throttle response in corners: limited — very long gear ratios mean lifting off does little to rotate the car
Trail braking: helps, but the rear still barely steps out under hard braking
Power delivery: only feels truly strong above 3,000 rpm — unlike the standard SL 600, which has full torque from idle

The long gearing is a recurring theme. Fourth gear alone spans from roughly 160 to 280 km/h. This makes mid-corner adjustability through throttle modulation very difficult.

All of this is probably fixable with careful alignment and damper tuning. But as delivered, the car doesn’t reward the driver in the way a vehicle with this pedigree and this price tag should. The CLK 63 AMG Black Series — with Arndt Maier’s hand on the chassis — was a revelation. This one feels like a missed opportunity.

Corners where the car should shine are precisely where the conversation turns awkward.

Final Verdict: A Collector’s Piece That Forgets to Be Fun

The Mercedes-Benz SL 65 AMG Black Series is a remarkable object. All 350 were hand-built by HWA, it’s the only twelve-cylinder Black Series ever made, and its performance in a straight line is genuinely intimidating. But the switch from ABC hydraulic suspension to a coilover setup has removed much of what made the base SL extraordinary, replacing it with a ride that’s punishing on public roads and a handling balance that frustrates on track.

The SL 65 AMG Black Series in summary:

✅ Brutally fast above 250 km/h
✅ Exclusive — only 350 ever built, all by hand
✅ The only Black Series V12
✅ Dramatic presence and genuinely wild engineering underneath
❌ Suspension that punishes driver and passenger alike on real roads
❌ Persistent front-end understeer with standard setup
❌ Lost most of what made the base SL feel magical
❌ Not the track-day weapon its looks promise

If you want the soul of what the Black Series programme set out to achieve, the CLK 63 AMG Black Series remains the one to find. The SL 65 is extraordinary — but for all the wrong reasons.