So you just made it big – you’ve been working your butt off and you finally wormed your way into the MD’s chair, or you’ve been bought out and you’ve got a bar or so to flaunt on a car that suits your newfound style. Or you have old money and its time for a cool new car.

But you still like driving and you’re concerned that limo you’re due for isn’t quite going to give you the on-the-road vibe the old 545i did…

Well relax – out of the blue you’re covered – now there’s all of a sudden a choice of fat-cat limos with a bit of go in them. Yes, Mercedes-Benz did offer an AMG version of its last S-Class and it went like stink. Good news is there’s a new Bähnstorming S out there in 63 AMG and it even has a newfound rival. And no, funnily enough the other option isn’t a BMW – it’s Audi’s all new V10 S8…

Be that as it may, here we have two fine efforts at satisfying the chairman or MD who not only never needed the chauffeur but also actually has a hidden need to let his hair down – to act like the animal he once was and drive the damn car. And then to reappear from whatever dark corner he went to let his hair down and carry the necessary genteel pose along William Nicol or de Waal Drive…

My kind of a car…

Anyway, the job at hand is to pit these two against each other to find a winner – and if that generally isn’t an easy task most of the time, be sure it’s ten times more difficult to call in cars like these – there is just so much more about them to consider. So let’s start on paper then – that normally shows up the plusses and minuses we can expect to of our coming evaluation:

Alphabetically, the A8 boasts a detuned Lamborghini Gallardo derived mill (that after all, was hewn out of a couple of Audi 5-cylinder lumps spliced at the hip…) V10 with a pair of cams per bank and 40 valves. Detuned it may be, but A8 whips up 331kW at an impressive 7000rpm – not quite an M5’s 373 or Gallardo’s 376kW, but still mightily impressive – especially since torque betters both those cars at 540Nm at a pussycat like 3400rpm. Well endowed? You bet!

Taking that power and torque and equating them against A8’s 5.2 litres and impressively lithe stature (it’s an all-aluminium car, remember) it outscores its rival here in every aspect of power and torque to weight and specific power and torque, too.

The Audi drives all four wheels via quattro AWD and a silky 6-speed Tiptronic swaps six cogs almost invisibly. Audi recons it’ll do all this in consummate style and still rush you to 100km/h in just over five seconds, while the speed limiter will promptly curb your progress at 250km/h.

The Merc is also most impressive on paper – it’s far more powerful and torquier than the Audi – that 6.2-litre 32-valve quad-cam V8 punching out a monster 386kW at a dizzying 6800rpm, while its 630Nm of torque is pretty much the normally aspirated acme these days.

But work that gargantuan six-point-two litres and it’s considerably chubbier all-steel two-and-a-half tonnes into the mix and suddenly the Merc appears to pale in significance as that alloy bodied Audi seems to come into its own. The Audi promises to have the Merc covered on all fronts – a kilowatt per litre up, two Newton-metres per litre too, but in power to weight, it comes back to thump the Benz by close to 20kW and almost 35Nm per litre…

But Merc reckons S63 will get to 100 in 4.6 seconds, half a second quicker than the Audi even though the paperwork suggests otherwise. So, armed with this info we set off to our test strip expecting a black corner knockout…

Page: 1 of 3 - next