As far I can tell there are only three things worthy of criticism on the rather wonderful new Mercedes-AMG GT S: road noise, clumsy-looking clock faces and an especially nasty door-handle action.
That last one sounds like the most puerile of observations but it’s way, way too easy for such seemingly irrelevant aspects of a new car to sneak by unnoticed in a trail of sideways photographic smoke.
I think the car is a triumph – really, if you’re in the market for a 911, you need to go and try a GT just to see if its more hot-rod character suits you. But the door handle is an issue – really it is. Mad as it may sound, that’s your primary point of contact with the machine and its action should preface what will happen once you settle inside and prod the starter button. Instead you pull the thing and it cheaply un-clacks, then you wriggle your wrist and realise there’s play in the handle itself. It’s just unpleasant.
It would be easy to don the Exasperated of Sussex voice and wonder how a company capable of producing that sensational bi-turbo V8 could somehow overlook such an important detail, but the reality is AMG probably had no control over the specification of the handle and it came from the centralised Merc parts-bin.
But enough of my OCD nonsense. Door-handles aside, the GT has enough talent to really shake-up the marketplace. Porsche should be worried.
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