Grew out of the 1999 Vision SLR concept, itself a tribute to the 300 SLR “Uhlenhaut Coupé” racer of 1955, and reached production only after Mercedes-Benz brought in its Formula One partner McLaren to engineer and build it.[1] Every car was assembled at McLaren’s technology centre in Woking, England, not at a Mercedes-Benz plant. That was an unusual arrangement for a car wearing the three-pointed star.
The hand-built, supercharged 5.4-litre V8 stayed in production essentially unchanged for the run’s whole seven years, growing from 626 PS in the original coupé to 650 PS in the 722 Edition of 2006 (named for Stirling Moss’s start number in the 1955 Mille Miglia) and finishing with the windscreen-less Stirling Moss speedster of 2009, some 200 kg lighter than the standard coupé.
The standard coupé’s own 0-100 km/h time is not recorded here. The only figure Wikipedia’s article publishes for it is Car and Driver’s independently measured 0-60 mph time of 3.4 seconds, a different quantity, not converted to a 0-100 km/h figure in this entry. The Roadster, 722 Edition and Stirling Moss variants do have manufacturer-published 0-100 km/h figures, and those are used as given.
