Right off the bat, let's get one thing clear: none of these vehicles are stock. Thus, the drag races are irrelevant from a journalistic point of view, but still, cool to watch.
Drag racing rarely happens between two cars with factory settings. Often, people change the wheels and tires within a month of buying the car, but the Russians usually wait a lot less.
The Moscow mile has been a gathering place for speed junkies for several years, and people have begun to bring their toys from the Middle East as well. If you want to see how much power a Mercedes or BMW needs to take on supercars, this is the place for you.
Each of these AMG motors plays its cards close to the chest, since the organizers aren't giving us any horsepower figures like they usually do.
But we have managed to dig up some dirt. The Mercedes-AMG GT S comes from Morendi, a tuning shop near Moscow. Their Stage 2 package takes the 4.0-liter twin-turbo V8 to 640 hp and 780 Nm (575 lb-ft) of torque. It's been clocked from 0 to 100 km/h (0-62 mph) in 3.4 seconds and 100 to 200 km/h (620124 mph) in 6.7 seconds.
Next up, we have a CLS63 AMG 4Matic from PP-Performance with a State 2 kit, which is the winner of the first race. We had seen it take on a Dodge Viper last year, so we know that it produces around 740 horsepower. The bigger engine and all-wheel-drive system certainly can't hurt, but it's amazing to think there's a 330-kilogram (727 pounds( difference between the 4-door coupe and its sportscar counterpart.
The ML 63 is proving a lot harder to track down, but there was one Stage 2 project in 2014 that delivered 714 PS and 1100 Nm (811 lb-ft) of torque thanks to a McChip-DKR engine map, custom exhaust, bigger intercooler and a sports air intake. However, we think that we are dealing with the same 900 hp black SUV that raced a tuned BMW X6 M earlier this month.
Somehow, that doesn't sound like enough to take down a bespoke sportscar that's been tuned to 640 horsepower.
Mihnea's favorite cars have already been built, the so-called modern classics from the '80s and '90s. He also loves local car culture from all over the world, so don't be surprised to see him getting excited about weird Japanese imports, low-rider VWs out of Germany, replicas from Russia or LS swaps down in Florida. Full profile
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