Back to Bedlam
February 22, 2008
The McMerc SLR was too much of a heavyweight to provide truly devastating performance. But this race-spec GT is leaner, meaner and in the mood for a fight.
'Strip that fixed rear wing off the back and it'll blitz 200mph with ease'
If you could distill anger to provide yourself with a supply of 100 
per cent proof 'Pissed Off', you'd basically have the opposite of a love potion - a fighting brew more effective than six pints of Stella and a quarter bottle of Teacher's. If you then fed the resultant cocktail to an unwary SLR, you'd end up with this; the Mercedes-Benz McLaren SLR 722 GT. A car that looks as comforting as a broken bottle swung at your face.
per cent proof 'Pissed Off', you'd basically have the opposite of a love potion - a fighting brew more effective than six pints of Stella and a quarter bottle of Teacher's. If you then fed the resultant cocktail to an unwary SLR, you'd end up with this; the Mercedes-Benz McLaren SLR 722 GT. A car that looks as comforting as a broken bottle swung at your face.
Before we immerse ourselves in the detail of this specific evolution, it's worth knowing a bit about the SLR history. There was a story doing the rounds when McLaren originally got involved with Mercedes to build the SLR, things got a bit fraught over what each company thought might be the ideal specification. McLaren apparently wanted purity and function, Mercedes the kind of car it could sell to expect-it-all rich people without having to justify enormous compromise.It was aircon versus aerodynamics, ultimate speed versus long-
distance driveability, focus versus the finer things. Neither won the argument conclusively, which is why the SLR is a little of both and all of neither. It ended up being a fabulous car that has the emotional cracks of an identity crisis peeping through the leather-clad carbon fibre. Which is why, in the bar fight of the universe, the regular SLR might be construed as something of a pearl-handled revolver - effective, but unnecessarily garnished.'The McLaren SLR 722 GT: a car that looks as comforting as a broken bottle swung at your face'
As the 722 it became more of a Saturday night special and in 722 GT form it has reverted to
something more akin to a Stanley knife blade gaffer-taped to a fist-sized piece of wood. This car is pared back to slice'n'dice efficiency, all the frippery burned away so that it requires you to get up close and personal. As they say: guns for show, knives for a pro.So what is the 722 GT? Well, this is a GT racer for those people who want to attack a circuit in a GT version of the SLR and not have to worry about driving it home afterwards.
The GT has been designed as a 'pure super-sports car' by British 
motorsports specialists Ray Mallock Limited (RML), has no approval for road use and will only take part in the SLR Club Trophy - a kind of SLR one-make series for the heinously rich run by the SLR Club. The motor is largely stock - nothing wrong with 5439cc of ultra-reliable supercharged V8 with 626bhp and 575lb ft of torque in a stock SLR, except it's been re-worked slightly with a new exhaust and race electronic fuel injection to produce 670bhp and 612lb ft of torque. That's marginally up on the 722 special edition's outputs of 650bhp and 605lb ft of torque and pushing over 21 per cent less mass. And it wasn't a tepid car in the first place. Zero to 62mph comes up in an entirely believable 3.3 seconds and the maximum speed is the only measurement down on stock at 315km/h, or 195mph.
motorsports specialists Ray Mallock Limited (RML), has no approval for road use and will only take part in the SLR Club Trophy - a kind of SLR one-make series for the heinously rich run by the SLR Club. The motor is largely stock - nothing wrong with 5439cc of ultra-reliable supercharged V8 with 626bhp and 575lb ft of torque in a stock SLR, except it's been re-worked slightly with a new exhaust and race electronic fuel injection to produce 670bhp and 612lb ft of torque. That's marginally up on the 722 special edition's outputs of 650bhp and 605lb ft of torque and pushing over 21 per cent less mass. And it wasn't a tepid car in the first place. Zero to 62mph comes up in an entirely believable 3.3 seconds and the maximum speed is the only measurement down on stock at 315km/h, or 195mph.'Gone is the aircon, gone is the stereo, gone is the centre console, gone is the, er... everything'
The best thing about the 722 GT is that if you stand next to it, or even better sit in it, you really, really want to have a go. More than any single seater, there's something about the GT that makes you desperate to fire it up and potter off to an airfield somewhere.
