Angel vs Demon. Car vs Motorcycle. Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG vs Ducati Diavel Carbon. Driver vs Rider. Sounds like quite a getaway, right? It was, and here’s all you need to know about it.

What is Driver vs Rider? This is a concept which celebrates the joy of roadtripping with a performance car and motorcycle. xBhp has always been a platform for high-performance motorcycle touring, and that is why the introduction of such wonderful cars, once in a while even more captivating. Moreover, to oust doubts and arguments, we often mark these cars as ‘back vehicles’. Smart, eh? 

This trip, however, is a ‘Minisode’, which means it was not a full fledged roadtrip that xBhp usually does. This one just spanned over 1,000 kilometres in Australia over two and a half days.

The pleasantly surprising highlight of this one-and-a-half-day cameo was definitely the aural part of it, besides the much-expected visual overload of the two exotics. 

The staccato of the Diavel, coupled with the deep growl and crackles of the SLS were music enough for me, and I didn’t feel at all inclined to use the services of the nine-speaker Bang and Olufsen setup that comes standard with the car. Its exhaust note sounded even better than the CLS 63 that we had driven on the US roadtrip a couple of months ago. 

This time we had the Diavel Carbon, which differs a little from the base version that we rode against the AMG CLS 63 in the US last issue of the magazine. The Carbon version has to carry three kilograms less weight due to savings from machine-forged aluminium Marchesini wheels and a carbon-fibre fairing. 

In addition to this, there are subtle changes, such as a diamond-like coating (DLC) on the Marzocchi forks, milled aluminium brake disc carriers, and black accessories. The other usual technoperformancewizadry was there – 162 HP, ABS, DTC, riding modes et al.

The SLS was altogether on a different plane – a true roadster, a true supercar. We were to get this super special car just for three days, and for this, I had to become the Driver! I had to forgo the Diavel to a man called Aditya Pande, who is an old xBhp member, now settled in Melbourne, Australia. I could live with that since I knew how special this car was. 

My head went dizzy when I first saw the car in the flesh, standing in front of the Mercedes Australia reception. I could not get myself to believe that I will soon be in the driver’s seat and doing a thousand kilometres in this, along with one of the finest motorcycles in the world. This car was the sort of automobile whose scale models you and I would buy happily or drive in video games at the very best. 

And certainly getting to experience it in reality, for such long-distance driving on your own chosen route is nothing short of ticking off an important task on your bucket list. This becomes more special when you know that it is a half-million-dollar car with 571 horses beneath you, threatening to turn your life head over heels lest you lose control to that urge to put the pedal to the metal, especially so when this is only the third car that you have driven in your life.

But I did just that. Right off the mark, I pushed the pedal to the floor, the car’s deep growl turned into a manic frenzy, like a hundred tainted souls getting exorcised from a body where they were not supposed to be. The zero to hundred was all that mattered, more specifically, how you got to it. Beyond that, in clinical road environments like that of Australia, it’s just asking for your wallet to get lighter. 

So me, the Rider turned Driver, Aditya Pande (the Rider), and another old xBhp member, Kunal Bakshi (whose online handle is Bikecrazy) started from Melbourne in very bad weather. I was aghast. Rain and low light are very bad for photography, and I couldn’t bear losing a chance of a lifetime to the elements. However, this time it was a bigger problem for the Rider as I was ensconced in the very low and very wide SLS. All I cared about were places to shoot!

The route involved a lot of highway driving, essentially cutting down on photogenic avenues even more. We went from Melbourne to Halls Gap, a place in the scenic area of the Grampians in Victoria. From there, we went towards the shore and hit the town of Warrnambool. From here, we covered the whole of The Great Ocean Road.

Kunal (bikecrazy) assumed the role of the Rider for a while, and it was a pleasure to watch him negotiate the curves. He had been racing at the local circuits for quite a while, interspersed with Philip Island track days on many of his previous bikes – the R6, R1 and the erstwhile Ninja 250R. But perhaps more on him in a later issue of the xBhp magazine. 

The SLS was unsurprisingly potent in the corner, more so in the very tight ones. It clung to the tarmac as if it were hammered along rails. I was especially enamoured with its RS (Race Start) setting. I would first try to find a long, empty country road, which was in surplus, actually, then I would turn the dial into RS mode, hit the brakes, accelerate up to 4000 rpm or so and then release the brakes. 

The car used to lurch forward like a demon that has been let out of captivity after eons. It was simply fantastic, addictive and downright corrupting. If the Australian police were to issue a ticket to drivers of one of these, it may very well be redirected to the makers of this car. The number of computations going on inside this car for a feat like this is nothing short of mind-boggling. Managing the traction control, the perfect rpm to shift, and lots more must be accounted for. 

And then I used to think, what was the use of having a mode dial on such a car at all? You will need a seriously confused case to drive it in any mode other than S+ or M (manual). Even the manual shift was a revelation and an education into some fantastic engineering solutions. The SLS has a dual clutch gearbox (DCT) that enables gearshifts in as little as 100ms. 

With gizmos like this, coupled with even more stuff like the rear wing, which comes up at speeds more than 120 km/h, it gave it oodles of oomph, not only in the performance sector but in the looks department as well.

The single unique visual aspect of the car that literally took it to a whole new height was the gull-wing door. Mind you, there are other versions of the SLS available, like the roadster and the coupe, and these versions don’t employ the services of these outrageously cool pieces of glass and metal. 

The highlight of every stop was opening the doors skywards. It was unlike any piece of machinery on the road, unless you had some of the very few cars in the world sporting a similar arrangement. Or if you happen to stop alongside the owner (a filthy super-rich owner) of the original gull-wing Mercedes sensation – the 1954 300SL, which will be worth more than twice the price of an SLS today! In my case, neither of them happened, so I was comfortably the king of the road, and one of the richest people in Australia – in my head.

The Rider was not left out of the limelight entirely in this one-sided contest. The Diavel held out on its own mettle. No amount of electronics, power or skills can outrun a good motorcycle launcher. The Diavel’s 162 horsepower, coupled with the DTC (Ducati Traction Control) and fat-meat rubber at the rear, made sure that even the SLS could be seen in its rear view mirror, at least for the first few hundred metres. 

Like in most supercars, the limitation that I faced with the SLS, which actually became as much a hindrance as its gull wing doors were a boon, was the long and low front hood. Many times it came dangerously close to scraping the pavements of many decent parking lots and gas stations. You don’t want to do that to any car that is worth more than a house on a beach!

These three days were one of my most memorable in life, as all my roadtrips are. Despite the bad weather, the machines inspired me to find and shoot moments. No matter how many high-performance motorcycles I ride, I still feel the child in me get excited when I hop onto a new one. 

With the same enthusiasm, I have started seeing these high-performance cars, although they can never compare with the thrill of leaning a bike into a corner, but they can surely give you a high with all those intoxicating G forces working on the body. And it doesn’t hurt driving a half-million-dollar car that has been engineered par excellence. 

Talking about engineering, no, German engineering, I was reminded of Steve Jobs. I was reading his biography these days, and it was interspersed with incidents that demonstrated his fascination with Mercedes cars. I could only just begin to appreciate why. So will you if you get to drive it.