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It’s the sound that gets you. With the top down, the SLS AMG Roadster becomes a wingless wonder with a very loud and wicked soundtrack that will stir your soul.

The SLS AMG Coupe already introduced the notion that a German supercar could sound almost exactly like a NASCAR Sprint Cup race car, but, when driven with the top down, the Roadster turns it up a notch. Think of the movie This is Spinal Tap when the Nigel Tufnel character explains that the band’s amplifier volume settings go up to 11 and you’ll get the idea.…

The Roadster replaces the fixed roof and the über-cool gullwing doors of the Coupe with a folding Z-shaped three-layer soft-top — which can be raised or lowered in 11 seconds and at speeds up to 50 kilometres an hour — as well as two conventional doors. The proportions and overall dimensions of the Roadster are identical to those of the Coupe, so you get the same very long hood and short rear deck, but the Roadster looks more low-slung with the top down. To compensate for the lack of a fixed roof, additional bracing has been added to the dashboard, the door sills have been reinforced and the car gets extruded aluminium cross- members with fixed roll bars as well as stabilizing struts between the rear suspension towers. The end result is that the Roadster’s body structure is very stiff. Yet the new car weighs just 40 kilograms more than the Coupe, which effectively means that it is just as fast. AMG engineers claim the Roadster will reach 100 km/h in 3.8 seconds and run all the way up to a top speed of 330 km/h, performance numbers that are identical to those of the Coupe.

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