Jeremy Clarkson - What Could Possibly Go Wrong...

Quietly. There’s no fuss with this GTI. No drama. No rorty exhaust noises. You see a gap. You put your foot down. The overtaking manoeuvre is completed. You reach a bend. The electronic front diff makes sure there’s no understeer and no unseemly tugging at the steering wheel either. You come out on the other side. It is a machine built to make speedy progress. It is German.

There’s more too. It costs just £195 more than the previous model and, thanks to a camera-based emergency braking system, it has fallen five insurance groups. And for a 150-mph-plus car it is also extremely economical.

What we have here then is a bundle of pure, undiluted common sense. Except for two things. First, you can’t buy it with optional 19-inch wheels in combination with a sunroof – no idea why. And second, you can choose between Comfort, Normal and Sport settings for the front differential, the suspension, the gearbox and the steering, so I did a test. I took the car to Top Gear ’s test track, put it in Normal and asked the Stig to do a lap. He did it in 1 minute 29.6 seconds. I then put it in Sport. This time he did a lap in 1 minute 29.6 seconds. So then I put it in Comfort, which softens everything up. He did it in 1 minute 29.5 seconds.

Adjustable suspension and gearboxes are fitted to many cars these days, and I’ve long harboured a suspicion they make no difference to how fast a car goes. And here’s proof. Sport makes the ride uncomfortable but provides no benefit at all. In its Normal setting the GTI is tremendous. The sportiness is still there – the times prove that – but Comfort mode is sublime. It’s phenomenal and brilliant.

Inside, it’s as logical and as sensible as a German’s knicker drawer and you have the impression that everything will still be working perfectly in ten years’ time. Except for the radio, which broke after two days. And a bit of trim round the rear window, which fell off. But to be fair, I was testing a pre-production model. And the man responsible for these mistakes will have been shot by the time the lines start to roll for real.

Best of all, though, nobody took my picture as I drove along. I had a car that can rip holes in the physics books, that can scream to 62 mph in just over six seconds, that slices through the bends like a well-drilled monoskier and that is as comfortable as having a nice lie down. But nobody looked at it twice.

The only thing that annoyed me was the double-clutch flappy-paddle gearbox. It was impossible to set off from the lights smoothly, and by the fourth day I was being driven mad. By the seventh I was so angry my nose was beginning to itch. And then I discovered the ‘auto hold’ button.

Fitted to stop the car rolling backwards when you are doing a hill start – you can’t ride the clutch with a flappy-paddle box and there’s none of the in-built ‘creep’ you get from a traditional automatic – it applies the brake whenever you stop. And then, when you put your foot on the throttle, it takes the brake off again. But not fast enough. Hence the jerk.

I turned it off and all was well. Very well. For me this car is perfect. And if you’re honest, it’s perfect for you too.

For a hundred years Mercedes was a byword for solid, sensible engineering. While the rest of the world let its hair down and listened to Jimi Hendrix, the company plodded on with its doleful recipe of longevity with just a sprinkling of toughness. The men of Stuttgart built no-frills cars that were made to last. They were tortoises to counter the hares from BMW.

If you want to drive across Africa next weekend, then by all means get yourself a Toyota Land Cruiser. But if you actually want to get there, you’d be better off with the standard Mercedes from the late 1970s and early 1980s. In a world of thongs and briefs and frilly bits of nothing, this was a sturdy pair of games knickers. It was a car that simply didn’t know how to let you down. And it still doesn’t today.

But then one day the company chiefs got bored with making games knickers, so they got together with a little-known tuning company called AMG and went berserk.

The cars that resulted are stupid. They are too big, too loud, too crazy, too brash, too sideways most of the time and too scary as a result. I like them a lot.

I like the way that a BMW or a quick Audi is designed to put a fast lap time on the board, whereas an AMG Mercedes is designed to put a smile on your face, and most of its rear tyres into the atmosphere. In a world where fuel economy is king and tall poppies are frowned upon, it’s refreshing to find a range of cars built purely for blood-and-guts savagery. They are not sniper rifles. They are dirty great artillery pieces.

If I may liken all of the world’s cars to weather, you have many that are drizzle and some that are lovely sunny afternoons. You have those that are precise and fast, like lightning. And some that are just Tupperware grey as far as the eye can see. Then you have the AMG Mercs. They are cracks of thunder. They are V8 muscle cars. A blend of the American dream and German engineering. They are tremendous.

But then several months ago I drove an AMG-badged A-class Mercedes, and that wasn’t a V8, or thunderous, or even very muscly. Its AMG badge was writing cheques the car simply couldn’t cash. I gave it two stars and wondered what on earth Mercedes was thinking of. Putting that badge on that car was… well, it would be like calling a small river launch HMS Ark Royal .

And now the company has done it again with this car. It is called the A45 AMG, and, to be honest, I was expecting about 14 feet of solid, chewy disappointment. However… Let’s start with the engine. It’s a turbocharged 2-litre unit that meets emissions legislation that the EU hasn’t even introduced yet. It’s quite frugal too. Despite this, it’s the most powerful four-cylinder engine in production.

The figures are fairly astonishing. You get 355 brake horsepower, which means you’re getting almost 178 bhp a litre. To put that in perspective, the V8 in a Ferrari 458 Italia can manage only 125 bhp a litre. There is some very clever engineering in here.

And because the A45 is so clever and so potent, Mercedes decided it could not solely be front-wheel drive. Because asking the front wheels to do the steering while handling 355 rampaging German horses would be like asking a man who’s on fire to solve a crossword puzzle. So it has a system that sends up to half the power to the rear wheels should those up front become a bit flustered.

On top of this, Mercedes fitted big brakes, lowered the suspension and slotted in a fast-acting, double-clutch, flappy-paddle gearbox. And the result is… quite boring.

It’s all so planted and neutral and benign that you wonder whether you’ve climbed into the diesel version by mistake. And then you look at the speedometer and what it’s saying is scarcely believable. Most of the time I was going almost exactly twice as fast as I’d guessed.

All previous AMG Mercs make you feel as if you’re going faster than you really are. This one does the exact opposite.

That said, Mercedes has tried to give it some of its big brothers’ traits. When you change up, the exhaust sounds like Rubeus Hagrid clearing his throat. And there’s a feel of great heaviness. Probably because that’s what the car is: heavy. But, whatever, you have to manhandle it through the bends as though you’re trying to get a piano up a back staircase. You have to work for your rewards.

And, boy oh boy, are they there. The engine has an uncanny knack of delivering lots of meaty torque right the way up to 5000 rpm and then, just as you think it’s game over and time for another gear, you get a frantic burst of power. And then you are going three times faster than you’d guessed. Happily, then, the brakes are immense and the handling is sublime. Obviously it won’t stick its tail out and smoke like every other AMG product. But it doesn’t understeer unduly either. It just goes round the corner in such a way that you get the impression it wasn’t really trying.