Powersliding a prototype around a track for the holidays? Seems legit.
Mercedes-Benz isn’t in the Christmas spirit. Okay, perhaps that’s bit harsh. The German automaker is most decidedly all excited for the holidays, but the gearheads at AMG have more on their minds than eggnog and cheery songs. And you know what? We’re just fine with that.
As everybody prepares to enjoy a long weekend for Christmas, the AMG team is still putting its forthcoming A45 hot hatchback through the paces. By that, we mean testing the car’s opposite-lock capability at pretty much every opportunity – morning, evening, sunshine, and rain. Honestly, if we had a choice between singing Christmas carols downtown or thrashing a 400-horsepower (298-kilowatt), all-wheel-drive, AMG-tuned hot hatch around a race track, know that we would at least be listening to some Bing Crosby on the stereo while laughing maniacally through the corners.
We can’t really call this a spy video since it came from AMG proper, so instead, consider this a teaser for the A45. There’s already some familiarity due to its A35 sibling already being available, but that car only has 302 horses to play with. The A45’s 2.0-liter turbocharged mill will certainly go above and beyond, and judging from this video clip, it doesn’t have any trouble getting sideways. That’s because the A45’s 4Matic setup should offer plenty of settings for various environments, shuffling power fore and aft to let the hatchback dance on the edge.
The video shows the car still covering its AMG-massaged face, but it sure looks like the automaker has the mechanical side dialed in. We don’t know exactly when AMG will raise the curtain, but it should be sometime in the first half of 2019. Unfortunately for those of us in the U.S., the hatchback isn’t slated for North America so we’ll have to get by with the sedan version. Darn.
Source: Mercedes-AMG via YouTube
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