In the modern age, it’s not uncommon for dealerships to offer their customers a little something more than drip coffee and biscuits. I’ve seen multiple dealerships with in-store Starbucks locations, and Galpin Ford has its own restaurant as well as incredible museum pieces on display ranging from exotics to motorsports legends to ogle while you while away your time. However, for those who like to go fast, Canadian Mercedes-Benz dealer just bought the greatest plaything of all time — a freaking runway.
More specifically, CTV News reports that Mercedes-Benz Downtown Calgary has bought Cayley Flying Ranch Airport, located 52 miles southeast of downtown Calgary, Alberta. With a 4,921-foot paved runway, it’s the right sort of venue to put a performance car through its straight-line paces, something the dealership has already done for its YouTube channel.
It seems that Mercedes-Benz Downtown Calgary sees this more than just marketing, but also as an opportunity for customers to put their new Benzes through their paces without getting them impounded. After all, a zero-to-60 mph run goes by pretty quickly in an AMG. As General Manager Mazen Aboulhosn told CTV News:
A simple test drive isn’t going to show you what these high-performance luxury vehicles are going to do. But having a runway that’s almost 5,000 feet long lets you see exactly what they can do.
It also turns out that having a runway will show you what vehicles of a different performance proclivity can really do. Look, you probably wouldn’t find many people drag racing electric versus diesel Sprinter vans, but that’s exactly what Mercedes-Benz Downtown Calgary did, and the electric one actually pulled on the diesel one at the end of the half-mile. Stick that fact in your brain for use in pub trivia.
However, don’t expect the runway to remain basically untouched. Aboulhosn told CTV News, “We will be developing this further beyond what it is,” and some big plans are being discussed. Amid talk of potentially building an entire motorsports complex on the runway’s 160 acres, the dealership has also floated the ideas of an off-road course and space for drifting, both of which make perfect sense given Mercedes-Benz’s current lineup. After all, the AMG C 63 and AMG E 63 both feature drift modes, and the G-Class is built to venture off the beaten path. You might never use drift mode in your E 63 or all the locking differentials in your G-Class in the sort of driving you do, but wouldn’t it be cool if you could at least once?
In addition to being a venue for customers to live out their dreams, it’s also the sort of place ideal for rentals. Half-mile racing is taking off, but it’s often difficult to find places both able and willing to host these events. For those of us who like to go fast without risking our licenses, more opportunities for fun are always welcome.
While there are lots of things a dealership can put on for its customers, buying a runway rules pretty hard. I’m all for taking it to the track, and any talk of more potential venues to legally go fast is worth getting excited about. Let’s cross our fingers for the car enthusiasts of Calgary, because if this works out as planned, it’s almost certainly going to whip ass.
(Photo credits: Mercedes-Benz Downtown Calgary)
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Ive always advocated for racetracks at every dealership. Not for customers or anything stupid like that but for the technicians to replicate driveability concerns and to set emissions monitors. Anyone who has attempted to set the monitors on a light diesel (for example a diesel X5) would know the ridiculous things the car wants you to do to set them. Also its fun to beat on cars that arent yours.
For reference-Calgary doesn’t have so much as a drag strip anywhere nearby. It was at least 200km to the nearest dragstrip, let alone track, for about 15 years; even now, there is nothing inside city limits.
Sorry I want a race track not a drag track but kudos for some one thinking out of the box.
That’s more or less what BMW does with their performance driving centers. It’s a great bit of fun and it does get people excited to drive their new cars when they can really push them to their limits in a safe, controlled environment.
Canadians confuse me. I thought it was a metric country, but the guy describes it as a 5000′ runway.
The problem is a combination of proximity to the US – so your pop culture and obsession with monarchy units still seeps in – and old people who still haven’t gotten over the metric shift. So you still have completely random shit that’s just in imperial for no good reason, like height and weight, and certain (but not all) distances.
Kinda like how the top gear lads usually used the imperial system mingled with metric in a beautiful not-harmony that no one could follow
Apparently their use of metric and imperial is random enough to require a flowchart:
https://i.imgur.com/8FjIQUa.png
Can confirm. Even that flowchart doesn’t describe the whole insanity of it. For instance, trap speed is still in MPH, lumber is imperial, volume not for cooking is metric unless it’s beer (pints) or buckets (gallons), car curb weight is still pounds for some reason, and distance eventually gets measured in hours, which is actually time.
It’s aviation- runway lengths (and altitudes) are always described in feet per ICAO standards.
“it’s also the sort of place ideal for rentals”
I guess that means “rent the facility,” but I’d like to rent a turn in a Mercedes on their runway! Depending on what they’d charge lookie-loos, I’d happily drive fifty miles to play with somebody else’s cars. Here’s hoping it works in Calgary so it expands!
That’s a bit silly.
Because the roads out of Calgary to Edmonton and Banff are dead-flat, absolute straight lines outside the city limits for about 1/4 of their respective distances, with few turns the rest of the way.
Never been to Calgary, but am pretty sure the RCMP knows all about that….
I wonder if the RCMP wouldn’t simply die of boredom out there.
I think this was listed for a little under 4M CAD. That’s only $2.8M in freedom bucks. That seems like a steal.
Just need a bigger tire budget.
I need access to a half mile runway so I can do 0-60 runs in my Corvair.
Haha that would be far too much fun. With this being almost a mile, you have plenty of room for the old brakes to do their thing too!
Are you sure less than a mile is enough for 0 to 60 to 0 (km/h or mph, your pick)
I can’t even imagine what the conversation with their insurance company was like, or what this did to their premiums
“So um, we kinda bought something…”
So, we’re about two or three years from downtown Calgary being flooded with a bunch of AMG’s with the bumper sticker praying for another oil boom, and promising not to piss that one away?
“Canada” is the new “Mexico.”