We love the Mercedes-Benz CLS-class so much it borders on obsession. The cause of our infatuation isn't so much the car's mechanicals--great as they are--but the sexy, sexy, oh-so-damn sexy sheetmetal. (We did name it one of the six most beautiful cars available today in our September 2006 issue, after all.) Drop a hot motor in the thing, though, and forget about it. We're Pep? Le Pew floating around in midair. We're Eric Clapton writing "Layla." We're Kathy Bates in Misery. Obsession.
You can only imagine, then, how berserk we went when we found out this past summer that Brabus, the big-stick Benz tuner from Deutschland, crammed a twin-turbo V-12 between the CLS's front fenders, creating a 730-hp monster that will hit 225 mph. Two hundred. And twenty-five. Miles. Per. Hour.
They called it the Brabus Rocket.
And now it fights for good.
Yes, now its a cop car, created to promote the Tune It Safe! program in Germany. Tune It Safe! was itself created to encourage German tuning enthusiasts to do so responsibly and legally. It's the second such police car built--last year's was a Porsche 911 Carrera S done up by TechArt. Like the Brabus Rocket, the CLS cop car is stopped by 14.8-inch ventilated ceramic discs with twelve piston (!) calipers up front and 14.0-inch ventilated steel discs with six-piston calipers in the rear. The rear-wheel-drive perp wagon will hit 62 mph from a stop in 4.0 seconds, and its ridiculous top speed makes it the world's fastest police car.
It looks like our plan to rob a bank with a Corvette Z06 won't work out after all.
