What's Your Favorite German Car?

Front 3/4 view of a silver Mercedes-Benz CLK GTR

As car enthusiasts I'm sure that a lot of your time with friends is spent coming up with specific niches and categories of cars and then arguing about the best and worst examples, or just talking about your favorites. As I've done with British, French, Italian and Swedish cars, for today's question I want you to tell me about your favorite German cars. Let's try and keep this to production cars, so no race cars or concepts unless you have a really good answer. Bonus points if you own or have driven

your favorite German car.

If you know me, you would expect me to pick the Mercedes-Benz G-Class as my favorite German car. But the G-wagen is too easy of a choice for me, on its own pedestal far above anything else. So I put the G aside and thought harder about what my favorite German car really is, and the answer came quickly: it's the Mercedes-Benz CLK GTR.

There's Nothing Cooler Than A Homologation Special

I bet that some of you would also pick the CLK GTR as your favorite German car. How could you not? It was developed for the new FIA GT Championship racing series in 1997, which required homologated road-going production models for the top GT1 class. The CLK GTR may have used the same headlights, taillights, door handles, grille and hood ornament as the normal CLK coupe, but otherwise it was completely its own animal with a carbon-fiber monocoque fused to an aluminum honeycomb frame and a mid-mounted naturally aspirated V12 engine making over 600 horsepower. Somehow the CLK styling works on the GTR's wild proportions, and differences between the Straßenversion and race car are minimal. The road cars have a more usable, normal interior than you'd expect, too. They're just unspeakably cool.

The McLaren F1 had been dominating the previous seasons, and Porsche had come up with the 911 GT1, a similarly styled supercar to the CLK GTR, but they were no match for Mercedes. The three-pointed star took home both the constructor's and driver's championships in 1997, and the CLK LM follow-up was even more successful. Even if the race cars had been terrible, though, the CLK GTR would still be unspeakably cool. And with only 28 road cars built in total between 20 coupes, 6 roadsters and 2 prototypes, seeing a CLK GTR in person is a rare treat.

A Need For Speed Star

But what really solidified the CLK GTR as my favorite German car was its appearance in 2002's "Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2," one of the greatest racing games of all time. I had known about the CLK GTR and loved it for a long time before that, and it was featured in other games I played including previous NFS titles, but "Hot Pursuit 2" was the game I played the most, and the CLK GTR was always my favorite car to race in it. That has extended to so many other video games that I've played in my life, and I'm looking at multiple CLK GTR scale models on my shelves as I type this.

That's enough from me. What's your favorite German car, and why? Let us know in the comments below and I'll round up my favorite answers later this week. And before you make a joke, it was the 1999 Mercedes CLR that flipped at Le Mans, not the CLK GTR.