Muscle Bound

The Mercedes-AMG GT 63 S 4-Door may hark back to the street rods of the 1960s, but an astonishing range of abilities make it the thoroughly modern hooligan. Jon Wall drives it.

- Jon Wall

The 1960s and ’70s were the heyday of the muscle car, a genus of automobile developed by American manufacturers for street racing – though, of course, they’d never have admitted anything quite so crazily antisocial at the time. The formula was simple: Take one two-door sedan or coupe, shoehorn into its front end the biggest and most powerful V8 engine in your parts inventory, tart it up with a fancy name and paint job, maybe a floor-mounted gear shifter and definitely a set of alloy wheels, and then place it at the front of your showrooms – usually with a surprisingly affordable price sticker on the windscreen – as a halo car for your brand.

It was a strategy adopted by almost every major US auto brand. At one extreme, the desperately staid American Motors Corporation attempted to add sparkle to a lacklustre image through its Rambler Rebel, which after being force-fed a course of such steroids was unfeasibly badged as “The Machine”; at the other was General Motors’ Pontiac division, whose GTO was for a time regarded as one of the coolest cars in the States, in spite of a name shamelessly misappropriated from a racing Ferrari.