If you don’t know Hans Werner Aufrecht's name, you’ll almost certainly know his work. One of the founding partners of AMG, he’s been in the business of making Mercedes-Benz's finest (and others) go very fast both on and off track since 1967. Mercedes brought AMG in-house in 2005, and the main man went on to found his own emporium of speed: HWA.
HWA, much like AMG, designs, builds, and engineers complex and fast cars for road, race, and even research. Ensuring other people’s cars are quick is one thing, but the company decided that now’s the time to make its own car, the HWA EVO.
It’s a modernized take on the legendarily bewinged Mercedes-Benz 190E 2.5-16 Evo II, a car that makes people of a certain age go all weak at the knees. The HWA Evo uses a twin-turbo 3.0-liter V-6 kicking out up to 486 horsepower, allowing the car to clip speeds as high as 185 miles per hour. That motor’s wrapped up in a composite body true to the original car’s look, though with a touch more aggression—like 19-inch wheels up front and 20-inch wheels at the back—as well as a bit of HWA’s trademark handiwork. All to make sure it’ll delight owners on the track and on the way home from it.
At the 2024 Goodwood Festival of Speed, we caught up with Aufect, HWA CTO Gordian Von Schoning, and CEO Martin Marx to get the skinny on the firm’s creation. First of all though… why now?
"We decided to have our own car because we’re all in a transition period, and we need to go out and have our own product," says Marx. "It’s a business opportunity, of course, because historically we’ve been the hidden champion."
The choice of car is an important one. The 190E 2.5-16 Evo II is so heralded by so many, it makes perfect sense to bring it up to date. When you look at some of HWA’s greatest road car hits—the CLK-DTM AMG, the Apollo IE, and plenty more—as a pin in the ground, it feels… right.
Marx continues: "Especially in Europe, it's, I guess, the most iconic Mercedes car we raced. Mr. Aufrecht was the guy who told Mercedes they needed to do something. 'We need to have a proper racing car, a homologation base car to be more competitive on the race circuit.' So this is where this car really began."
As starting points go, it’s one of the best, but this is only the beginning: "There are other cars also asking to get this reinterpretation," adds Marx. What will those cars be? It remains a mystery for now.
The car itself promises to be a technical masterpiece. With a price tag kicking off at $775,000 (ish) and a run of just 100 examples, the kind of people HWA is targeting aren’t going to accept anything other than perfection. Also, to ‘get’ HWA is to know what it’s done in the past, which means future customers will be expecting its finest work.
"We wanted to showcase what our capabilities are. All the projects we have done have been for other brands. We wanted to build up more visibility, to showcase what we are good at," says Von Schoning.
Von Schoning went on to explain that the process of creating HWA’s first car started with talking to race car clients to find out what they would want from a homespun machine. It turns out even the super well-heeled have the same concerns about classics as the rest of us—they love the idea of them, but find them expensive, delicate, and not as exciting on track as they’d like. Taking an iconic project and bringing it up to date seemed just the ticket.
"We wanted to showcase what our capabilities are."
The Evo looks to be the business, but at the start of the project, imaginations ran wild. “We started with the idea to use a carbon monocoque as a base chassis, having our own engine… these things were in our mind at the beginning,” comments Von Schoning, “I’m so happy Martin [Marx] said ‘Hey, that’s going to be a road car, don’t do that stuff to it, and we need to sell 100 of them.”
Occasionally, even with a nearly $800,000 car, there are limits.
Clients, says HWA, aren’t upset that there isn’t a thumping V-8 up front, though they weren’t keen on the idea of a four-cylinder. This is a car about balance and drivability, which means a perfect mix of grunt, lightweight, and engagement is required. Having a whacking great eight over the nose would rather go against that. The power its V-6 offers though, is yet to be determined.
"To be honest, the engine power hasn't been really, totally signed off," says Von Schoning, "We just put the first engines on the dyno a couple of weeks ago. And our engineering department is very conservative. They're not really known for showing off."
The target numbers are all well and good, but it’ll be a journey of discovery to see what’s reliable, possible, and drivable.
When the car broke cover there was an outpouring of love, and the firm says there are some big, well-known names on the list of buyers. Mr Aufrecht is aware that there’s a huge reason for the hype.
"They have history with these cars, at the time they were first driving them they were the very best," he says. "Today, years later, the philosophy of those cars is completely different. Today what we’re doing is showing our customers old cars with the philosophy of new cars. That’s what our customers want."
When it finally hits the road, it’ll undoubtedly be incredible. We’ll see how it fares soon.
