No, 355 Horsepower Is NOT Enough.

Yeah, you heard the man. The little rocket of a car is simply not enough. The 355 horses that come out of the exhaust in the form of fire able to propel the car to 60 mph in less than 5 seconds just doesn't do it for him. The man is a Middle-Eastern rally champion by the name of Mohammed Bin Sulayem, and the car is the SLK55 AMG.



Bin Sulayem is a very successful race car driver and obviously has a taste for highly-capable fine sports cars. The streets he regularly drives around on, however, don't feel the same way as he does about his rides. In Dubai, the roads just aren't forgiving enough for Mohammed's supercars. Potholes, tight corners, dirty air, none of it is ideal for cruising around in low-riding sports cars. He set out to solve the problem.

Recently, Mercedes-Benz and McLaren racing team designed and built the SLR, Mercedes' answer to all the top-end Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and Porsches in the world. It uses an extremely well-developed V8 that makes 617 horsepower. With a 0-60 mph time of 3.7 seconds, it is one of the fastest cars in the entire world. Bin Sulayem saw this as an opportunity. His SLK55 AMG has a V8 engine that is practically of the same design as the SLR, just set up differently since the SLK is a small, convertible sports car while the SLR is a big, mean super-race car.



With almost unlimited funds and a race engineering background, he decided to perform an engine transplant; just lift the engine out of the SLR and plop it in an SLK. His SLK55 (well, it should really be SLK SLR now) went from 355 horsepower to 617 horsepower and no stopwatch in the world has been able to catch it. You'll see that the difference between the two cars is only in the engine (above, the first photo is stock and the second is Bin Sulayem's). The SLR V8 is actually taller than the SLK's for weight distribution reasons, so he ended up having to cut holes in his hood to accomodate the height.



His other supercars simply "weren't suitable in the traffic-clogged streets of Dubai," Mohammed claims (autoblog.com), and so this one-off super sports car was built; to all you SLK drivers out there, this is either a dream weaver or a dream crusher, so save up $ (you'll need a lot of it) and make a difference. Any takers? Rohit??*



*Rohit drives a white 2006 Mercedes-Benz SLK350 that will be featured in May.

Mercedes-Benz AMG Center
www.autoblog.com
www.jalopnik.com