I had a very near miss with a Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren once. I was a whisker away from writing one off, but not, as you might imagine, by over-cooking it into a fast right-hander or experiencing a blowout at 300kph on the Autobahn. It was far less 'exciting' than either of those scenarios. Several years ago I ran an alloy wheel business, and I was just about to jack up an SLR and work some magic. The jack was poised in what seemed like a sensible place, just under the sill, when something in the back of my mind said "Stop!" And thank God it did. When I rang up the fella in McLaren's technical department to double-check what I was about to do, he told me that "if you'd have jacked it up there, mate, you'd have split the tub."
A lucky escape, then, and that was reflecting on the car at 2008 prices. In today's market you need a spare quarter-of-a-mill knocking about to bag an SLR, and two-and-a-half-times that amount for this one. Why? Because it's a 722 Edition and it was made, basically, because the SLR was a bit, well, underwhelming. Sure, the original car's 208mph top speed and 3.8sec 0-62mph time were both fast and quick, but the SLR was seen as too lardy and too much of a cruiser. And that was by the bloke who engineered it: Gordon Murray. He's on record as saying it should have been mid-engined, naturally aspirated and about 200 to 300kg lighter.
The 722 was, in a limited way, the car the SLR should've been from the start. I say limited because it was lighter, but by only 44kg, with the saving coming from, among other things, lighter wheels and aluminium Koni dampers instead of the original car's Bilstein shocks with steel casings. The suspension was also stiffer and the 722 sat lower - by 10mm - and had up to 128 per cent more downforce at speed.
The whole 722 twist was based on sharper responses, you see, to give it some hope against the Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano - a car that was very nearly as quick yet cost half as much. Naturally, the 722 had to offer a bit more performance to go with its greater agility. So AMG rinsed its supercharged, 5.4-litre V8 for all it was worth, pushing the output from 626 to 650hp and torque from 575 to 605lb ft. As a result, the top speed peaked at 209mph and the 722 bested the SLR's acceleration by a couple of tenths.
Why was it called the 722? As the advert rightly points out, it was a nod to the 1955 Mille Miglia, a race was won by the late Sir Stirling Moss and his co-driver Denis Jenkinson in an original SLR racer. That car's number was 722, which denoted Moss's 7.22am start time, and he completed the 992-mile race in 10 hours, 7 minutes and 48 seconds. His average speed over the race distance was 99mph, an incredible record that still stands today.
This 722 doesn't have that kind of racing heritage to fall back on, even if the car became the basis of the 722 GT racing car. In which case, why is this 722 so much more than a standard SLR, bearing in mind that, when new, it commanded a mere £17,000 premium? Because this UK-registered car is one of only 150 that were built. Rarity, as ever in today's crazy supercar market, is everything.
Photo credit | Damian Blades
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