Although Mercedes-Benz will end its SLR sports car partnership with McLaren next year, it will continue to build a flagship premium roadster, called the SLC, likely to be engineered by in-house performance unit AMG in Germany.
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The SLC is due to go into production at the Mercedes factory in Sindelfingen, near Stuttgart, according to media reports in Germany. Mercedes has confirmed that the partnership with McLaren will end in 2009, although the F1 team will continue.
Some 1,600 SLRs have been sold worldwide since launch in 2003 although the car has suffered technical problems. It was part of a recall affecting some 680,000 Mercedes cars in 2004 involving the electronic braking system and in 2006 Mercedes-Benz USA recalled 433 SLRs that developed overheating problems.
A McLaren spokesman said: “”The Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren production is going well but it’s always been known that production of the existing models would come to an end eventually. Consequently McLaren Automotive and Mercedes-Benz have been working on some exciting new variants and details will be revealed in due course.”
Meanwhile rumours of a final, open-top Speedster version appear to have been confirmed with ‘spy’ shots of the car being tested in Germany published by car magazines with video footage on YouTube.
The magazines report that 75 versions of the SLR 722 will be made and the car will pay homage to the silver 300 SLR driven by Stirling Moss in the 1950s. It will have no roof and only a small windscreen instead of a full pane. It will be around 440lbs lighter than the SLR and will have a top speed of 217mph.
Price is likely to be in the region of GBP350,000.
