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2021 Mercedes-Maybach S-Class spy shots: Ultra-luxury sedan almost ready for debut

Mercedes-Benz didn’t find much luck when it launched Maybach as a standalone brand in in the early 2000s. Poor sales of the ill-fated Maybach 57 and 62 sedans led to Mercedes axing Maybach in 2012.

However, a new strategy to utilize Maybach as an ultra-luxury sub-brand of Mercedes was hatched with the arrival of the previous-generation S-Class. A unique grille, a stretched body and one of the plushest interiors in the business turned out to be a winning formula, especially among China’s chauffeur-driven class.

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There’s now a new generation of the S-Class headed to Mercedes showrooms next year, and it too will receive the Maybach treatment. A prototype for the redesigned Mercedes-Maybach S-Class has just been spotted, and with most of the camouflage gear of earlier testers gone, it means we’re now close to the reveal.

The car will feature a uniquely long body compared to even the long-wheelbase S-Class that we get as standard here in the United States. It will also boast a grille with vertical slats whose design was inspired by the pinstripes of a suit. It’s becoming a staple of modern Maybachs. It appears the grille won’t be as tall as the one on the current Maybach S-Class, and the headlights, which will be shared with the redesigned S-Class, are also slimmer, which together with the shorter grille results in a sleeker, more streamlined face.

2021 Mercedes-Maybach S-Class spy shots – Photo credit: S. Baldauf/SB-Medien

The current Maybach S-Class comes with turbocharged V-8 and V-12 powertrains, and this should be true for the new generation, though we could see one or both powertrains augmented with hybrid technology.

Look for an S580 model with the same V-8 mild-hybrid setup found in the latest S-Class, good for 496 horsepower. The V-12 could also feature mild-hybrid tech and sit in an S650- or S680-badged model.

2021 Mercedes-Benz S-Class

The Maybach S-Class naturally will receive the latest technology developments at Mercedes. For instance, there should be self-driving capability, albeit in limited capacity. However, Mercedes—and thus Maybach, too—by as early as 2024 is expected to have cars with Level 4 self-driving capability on sale. These are expected to handle highway driving and parking situations with minimal to zero requirements from the driver. Given the 2024 release date, we could see the technology introduced in time for the redesigned Maybach S-Class’ mid-cycle update.

Look for the redesigned Maybach S-Class to debut in the coming weeks. An extra-long Pullman body style may also be in the works, though the previous-generation S-Class’ coupe and convertible body styles won’t be repeated.

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November 10, 2020
MODIFIED DELOREAN DMC-12: FROZEN ASSETS

When your accountant advises you to acquire a safe business asset, the only logical thing to do is build an ice-cool bagged DeLorean, right? That’s certainly Nick Allen’s kind of logic…

Feature taken from Fast Car. Words Dan Bevis Photos Dan Pullen

The 1980s were all business. If you weren’t barking ‘Time is money, my friend!’ into a huge mobile phone, resplendent in red braces and fat screw-you pinstripes, you weren’t playing the game. There was no time for anything but Filofaxes, three-martini-lunches and the acquisition of colossal wealth. And if you want to buy into that eighties culture today, you’ve got to have your business head on. The retro nostalgia is nothing without a keen focus on the bottom line. So when Nick Allen decided to buy himself the DeLorean you see here, it wasn’t a frivolous recreational pursuit – his accountant told him to do it, this was a strictly logical financial decision.

No, stop sniggering, it’s true. “I run a business, which makes me the guarantor for the rent on the place,” Nick explains. “My accountant said that I should buy an asset worth the value of one year’s rent – that asset shouldn’t be part of the business or my house, so in the event of the business going tits-up I can sell it and cover the rent for a year. My wife agreed that this was a good idea too. I didn’t tell her what I had in mind, but in my head I thought ‘F*** yeah, I’ve just bought myself a DeLorean!’”

Alright, at this point we should probably suggest that this perhaps wasn’t a decision totally informed by logic. No-one buys a DeLorean to be sensible. And Nick’s motoring history indicates that he’s got a playful sense of unique modifying; regular UK showgoers will most likely be aware of his bagged Volvo P1800ES. He’s also owned a brace of ex-police V70 T5s, and a couple of dozen other cars including an old-school Mk2 VW Scirocco (which he still owns), and that’s essentially a DeLorean without the gull-wings, right?

“The DeLorean’s pretty much the most eighties icon out there, isn’t it?” he grins. “I figured that since they’re going up in value so quickly at the moment, if I didn’t get one now I may never get one.” Ah, you see, he’s trying to justify it rationally again. As well he might, in fact, as Nick bought extremely well: “I bought it from a guy well-known in the DeLorean scene in the UK – it was imported from the USA and I became the first UK owner of the car, and its second owner overall. I had criteria of low miles and good chassis; this one came up with 5,600 miles and immaculate underneath.”

It was a truly excellent find, proper investment-grade stuff, and Nick’s mission statement from the start was clear: to keep it all as original as possible, with any modifications 100% returnable to stock. It’s taken around a year to get the car to the point it’s at now, but he reckons it’d take under two hours to return it to factory-original… aside from the slightly rolled arches, although we can forgive that minor collateral damage as there was a clear plan in place for the suspension.

“This car was born to be dropped,” Nick grins. “It just looks so much better. I’m actually amazed that this isn’t more of a thing with DeLorean owners – there was one guy in Canada who did it in about 2010, but other than that I haven’t seen another.” The car was taken to Jonathan at Intermotiv to carry out Nick’s cunning plan; Jonathan described the underside of the car as ‘museum-quality’ as he was unbolting bits from it, which is probably your ideal scenario when you’re modding a car of this sort of age. “The kit I chose was a KNTRL system,” says Nick, “mainly because we’re the manufacturing partner with them, I make the cases for the controls and ECU, but also because it has a retro-cool look that really goes with the DeLorean. The gear was obviously not off-the-shelf and Jonathan had to do a lot of work to get the right bits to make the kit. The front shocks especially: these are very short, and the only ones we could find to fit were from a Morgan 3-Wheeler! He makes the bags from scratch, and the tank and management were fitted neatly in the front boot; a new floor was made up to keep the original one untouched.”

With the car sitting pretty, it was time to address the aesthetics. Nick was keen to keep the exterior largely standard because, well, why wouldn’t you? But there were one or two issues to address, not least the fact that Mother Nature had done her level best to turn that sublime wedge-shaped body into an entirely different shape altogether. “The body was bad, there were so many dents everywhere,” he recalls with a grimace. “I took the car to Chris at PJ Grady at the start of 2019 for a full body resto – he reckoned it must have been outside in a hailstorm, there were 252 golf ball-sized dents, 90 of them on the bonnet alone.” Painstaking work, as these bodies are notoriously tricky to fix, and the flawless results are testament to countless hours of extraordinarily careful tapping and, most probably, quite a lot of swearing too.

Now, there are number of talking points with this car when it rolls into a show: the very fact that it’s a DeLorean is a big one for starters, and there’s also the fact that it airs out like a rock star. But for many, the key hook here is the unusual wheels. Because they look sort of like the stock multi-spokes, but at the same time they’re about a billion times more awesome. So what on earth’s going on there?

The answer is that they’re fully custom – the only set in the whole world. “I wanted the wheels to look like a modern version of the originals,” reasons Nick. “I set about designing my own in CAD which were essentially a 3-piece split version of the originals; I didn’t want to make splits from the actual wheels for the same reason of making the car returnable to stock if need be. So I then sent the info to a few wheel manufacturers, and the only one willing to take on the job was Mario from RAD48 – he did a total redesign from my design to make them 100% road safe, and after a few months of back-and-forwarding with mods and tweaks we ended up with the final result. The design was then sent off to the factory where they make AMG wheels. I decided on a 16-inch front and 17-inch rear – 2-inches larger than the original, and an offset a whopping 70mm larger than stock on the rear when spaced (goodbye wheel bearings!) – and 35mm unspaced. I chose to space them as it meant that if I had to bring them in for any reason, such as driving abroad, I could just remove the spacers and eliminate any poke from the drive height.”

It’s fair to say that, in spite of being primarily a business asset, Nick’s sensible purchase isn’t exactly a number on a balance sheet. It’s a product of passion and excitement, and boundless creativity, and it’s rapidly becoming one of the family. He loves taking it out to shows so people can enjoy his other-worldly creation, and his eighteen-month-old daughter is a handy excuse to take her out in the DeLorean and give the missus a break (win-win, right?). “The thing about a DeLorean is that even if you’re not a car person, you love it,” Nick beams. “It turns heads everywhere I go; regardless of age or gender, they all look and smile! I do have problems on motorways as people hover alongside taking photos while I’m driving, and of course the real problem is fingerprints. Goddammit does it pick up fingerprints! I leave the car for half-an-hour at the show and it’s covered by the time I get back because people want to see if its bare metal or not!”

There’s one element, among many, that really differentiates this project, and that’s the fact that it’s essentially an air-and-wheels build, something sometimes frowned upon as ‘easy’ in the scene – although it’s pretty obvious that this is no ordinary OEM+. This is a custom in the traditional style, upgraded with ultra-modern methods. “This project took a year to essentially do bags and wheels, which some people regard as the problem with the modified car scene, but I feel that this one is different,” shrugs Nick. “So much work went into getting it to where it is. I’m proud of it.” As well he should be. This is one of the coolest cars on the scene today, there’s absolutely nothing else like it out there.

And look at that, we’ve managed to get through an entire DeLorean feature without mentioning that movie. References? Where we’re going, we don’t need references…

TECH SPEC: MODIFIED DELOREAN DMC-12

Styling:
Full body resto with steel re-brush

Tuning:
2.85-litre PRV V6, 5-speed manual

Chassis:
8x16in (front) and 10.5x17in (rear) one-of RAD48 DLR wheels, 195/40 (f) and 235/40 (r) Continental tyres, custom air-ride by Intermotiv: Stealth shocks and bags, KNTRL management, strengthened lower control arms

Interior:
Stock interior with Back to the Future props (inc. hoverboard with integrated Bluetooth speakers)

Thanks:
“Jonathan at Intermotiv, Mario at RAD48, Chris at PJ Grady, Peter at KNRTL, and my accountant.”

Source

November 10, 2020
TUNED FORD ESCORT RS TURBO SERIES ONE

Driving instructors all have boring hatchbacks with knackered clutches, right? Ooh, don’t let Thomas Ross and his tuned Ford Escort RS Turbo hear you saying that…

Feature taken from Fast Ford magazine. Words: Dan Bevis. Photos: Ade Brannan

Everyone remembers what car their driving instructor had, it’s an instrumental part of all of our formative motoring experiences. Most likely it was a poverty-spec hatchback, all scratchy interior plastics and scuffed hubcaps and dual-controls, something chosen to be functional and utilitarian. Not a car you’d fall in love with, but merely a tool to educate, a means to an end. We’d wager your instructor probably didn’t have a tuned Ford Escort RS Turbo Series 1 with tiger stripes…

Now, we have to point out that Thomas Ross doesn’t take his students out for lessons in this RST, it’s not his work car. Makes quite a statement though, doesn’t it? After a hard day of explaining biting points and wheel-shuffling, an old-school hot hatch is quite a way to unwind. It all makes perfect sense really, as these cars have been under his skin since day one: “I always had an interest in cars from a young age, and by my teenage years I had a particular soft spot for Escort RS Turbos,” he recalls. “It was the car I wanted but, like many, I started off with an Escort Eclipse which was shamefully modified… imagine it, a four-door Escort with an RS bodykit, bonnet vents and whale tail, with heavily tinted windows! But that was back in ’97 when curtain hairstyles and loose-fit shirts were a thing, I’m still convinced to this day I had street cred back then. When I owned the Eclipse it was more about cosmetic modification, it was all about ‘the look’, especially at 17. However, over the years I owned various makes of cars that I modified and gained more knowledge about what was under the bonnet and all the mechanical aspects, even turning to a motorbike for a short while.”

Having slipped out of the Ford scene for a time, it all came flooding back when Thomas reached his early thirties and found himself presented with the opportunity to buy a Series 2 RS Turbo. This was back in 2012, and it became a rolling restoration of passion and frustration in equal measure, with endless dismantling and replacing and upgrading; it was all essential experience though, every step helped to build mechanical know-how. “By this point I also had a custom-built garage of my own to work in,” he recalls, “so it was the ideal time to invest in the car I’d always wanted to purchase: the Series 1 RS Turbo.”

Spending the best part of seven years elbows-deep in the S2, Thomas was more convinced than ever that the RS Turbo was the toy for him, and his affections were moving increasingly toward the idea of an S1. He had a clear idea of what he wanted, too – this would be no restomodded ZVH mutant, he wanted to keep the CVH with its stock KE-Jetronic setup and see just how far it could comfortably be stretched. And when a friend, Mark, sent over details of an S1 for sale on Facebook, Thomas was all over it. “I don’t think he actually expected me to go and buy it,” he laughs. “I’d seen the car previously at a local Lincs Ford Group meet so I was aware of it, but that was some time ago. It had been off the road for a while, hidden away; upon viewing it, I could see potential to carry on what the previous owner had already started, which included my favourite modification aspect – the tiger stripes! They initially drew me to the car, and I just had to have it.”

We don’t blame him. Those guys at Turbosystems back in the day have a lot to answer for, they created a culture of outrageous blue-and-grey decals that’s indelibly etched in the affections of any Ford fan who grew up modding in the eighties and nineties. The coolness has come full circle, we can’t get enough of the look these days. No wonder Thomas was instantly hooked.

It wasn’t just about the stickers, of course – it helped that this was a decent car, and he knew what he was getting himself into: “When we got it back to my garage a week later, I went over everything while stripping it down,” Thomas recalls. “The owner had been honest about what was needed to get it finished in his mind, and that’s where I started. As my journey continued with the car it became clear that there were plenty more adjustments I could make in order to enhance its performance, as well as ensuring that everything was in the right place and working correctly.”

Sitting fairly high up the to-do list was the engine, as Thomas had heard it prior to purchase and something was clearly amiss (“like a plumber’s toolbox falling down the stairs” is how he describes it…), so he coaxed Ian Howell from FWD Ford specialist Area-Six round for a cuppa and gently cajoled him into stepping into the garage.

“The first job was to tackle the solid followers, as I couldn’t bear the sound of it idling, resonating like a bag of nails,” says Thomas. “The adjustable lifters hadn’t been set by the installer, most had over 3mm clearance rather than 0.3mm. Ian tweaked them to the right setting, and once started it actually sounded quieter than my S2 hydraulics, which was a total transformation! I could actually hear the exhaust note for the first time. I still had the haze of smoke on start-up to tackle next, and after further inspection and unbolting the exhaust manifold I found three of the four exhaust valve guides had oily tar in the ports – I knew it would only get worse.”

Each one of these minor crises is really just an opportunity in disguise, and with the head removed Ian worked his Area-Six magic with bronze guide liners inserted, porting and polishing the head to its full potential, matching up the inlet injector plate, and completing various other conjuring tricks to complement the Newman Phase 4 cam. The next logical restriction in the system was the stock 0.36A/R turbine housing, and Ian advised replacing it with a 0.48A/R to flow the gases out as quick as the air was coming through the newly reworked CVH head.

While all this was going on, Thomas had been giving serious consideration to transmission too. He’d learnt his lesson with the S2 that a 4-paddle clutch, while hardcore, can somewhat reduce driving enjoyment in day-to-day scenarios, so he mated a Helix 6-paddle to the stock LSD ’box so as to cover all bases.

“When the car was all put back together, I took a trip with it to Motorsport Developments in Blackpool,” he continues. “After diagnosing a few nightmare electrical issues, it churned out 195bhp on their dyno on a standard ECU with just 10psi. That’s right, the ECU is not even chipped! Stu at MSD said ‘The KE-Jet is on its knees, this is as good as KE gets while still retaining good cruising fuelling’. Looks like I’ve achieved stretching the KE-Jet system to its max! Chipping the ECU and running the usual 1-bar boost is pointless at the moment, as the reworked CVH head and turbo combination would require additional fuelling from either a mappable 5th injector or standalone management ditching the MFI, but I’m very satisfied with where it is now. For me it’s quicker and more aggressive than my S2 that’s running the usual 1-bar boost and all supporting modifications!”

Naturally a car with such a retro approach to tuning should have all the classic upgrades below the skin to help it reach its full potential, and you wouldn’t be disappointed if you put it up on a ramp and had a poke about underneath: it’s sporting Cosworth 4×4 brakes, Koni adjustables with 60mm springs, adjustable TCAs, all the right bits that would have made you a hero of the seafront cruise back in the Britpop era. And those OZ Racing wheels are just period-perfect, aren’t they? (OK, they’re actually Ronal Aero R50s wearing Ford Motorsport graphics, but the effect itself is fully authentic.)

“Like with my S2, I intend to use the car wherever I can and as much as possible, not to have it tucked up in a heated garage rarely seeing the light of day,” Thomas assures us. “Peoples’ reactions are always positive as well, followed by shock when they find out I’m a driving instructor by profession with two RS Turbos! I’ve had people taking photos when out and about, even changing lanes to get a side shot, beeping their horns, and I’ve had so many thumbs-up I’ve lost count.” All of which would be an instant fail on your driving test of course, but let’s not split hairs. As driving instructors’ cars go, this is just about the coolest we’ve ever come across.

Tech Spec: Tuned Ford Escort RS Turbo

Engine:

1.6-litre CVH turbo, headwork by Ian Howell at Area-Six: ported, polished, valve heads re-profiled, 3-angle seats, adjustable solid followers, Newman Phase 4 cam, vernier pulley, Turbo Technics T3 0.48/50 trim turbo, -31 actuator, twin-piston dump valve, Bailey breather, 0.5mm oversized Mahle pistons, ARP bolts, shot-peened rods, polished crank, Airtec intercooler, Airtec 40mm radiator, twin fans, Group A coil, braided fuel lines, Roose Motorsport silicone hoses, Mongoose exhaust system, K&N panel filter, uprated fan switch, powdercoated header tank, rocker cover, charge carrier and breather, chrome-plated bonnet stand, alternator heat shield, distributor cover, fuel filter, alternator and brake servo brackets, AutoSpecialists fuel pump cradle

Power:

195bhp at 10psi (on stock ECU)

Transmission:

S1 LSD gearbox, Helix 6-paddle clutch, Millers 75w90 fully synthetic oil

Suspension:

Koni Sport adjustable gas shocks, 60mm lowering springs, adjustable TCAs, SuperPro polybushes, powdercoated front hubs, driveshafts, anti-roll bar and wishbones

Brakes:

Powdercoated RS Cosworth 4WD calipers, drilled and grooved discs, ATE TYP200 Dot4 fluid, powdercoated rear drums

Source

November 10, 2020