Sometimes excellent news comes in curious forms. For Hans-Werner Aufrecht, the choice by Mercedes-Benz to withdraw from all sorts of racing for 1965 must have seemed a disaster.
As an adolescent , he’d dreamt of building Mercedes race engines and now, soon after finding employment doing exactly that, the dream was close to be shattered.
A lesser person would have just accepted the inevitable and gone back to putting together road car engines. But not Aufrecht. With a like-minded colleague called Erhard Melcher, he managed to accumulate a 300SE, strip it, raise the facility of its engine from 170bhp to 238bhp and, with Manfred Schiek driving, win ten rounds of the 1965 German phaeton Championship.
News travelled fast and, by the top of the subsequent year, Aufrecht and Melcher were deluged with orders for faster Mercedes, to be used on road or track. So in 1967, they decided to offer up their jobs at Mercedes and found out shop on their own in nearby Burgstall. And within the moment when Aufrecht, Melcher and Aufrecht's hometown of Großaspach came together, AMG was born.
Business came thick and fast. Even Mercedes seemed to realise that it had missed a trick and began releasing more highly tuned versions of its road cars, the 1968 6.3-litre 300SEL to call the foremost obvious example. But what AMG could have interpreted as an effort to tug the rug out from under its feet was instead considered a singular opportunity: however fast and powerful a Mercedes super-saloon could be , AMG backed itself to form it even faster and more powerful.
It took three years, but by the time of the 1971 Spa 24 Hours, a 6.3-litre 300SEL road car with 247bhp had become a 6.8-litre racer with 428bhp. Despite the gasps of crowd and competitors alike at the looks of an outsized red cathedral on the grid, the SEL rumbled around to second place and a category win, outright victory being denied only by a rather frantic pitstop schedule needed to satisfy its appetite for fuel and tyres.
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Business boomed, boosted by a requirement for custom-made interiors also as engines, and by 1976 it had outgrown the Großaspach premises, prompting a move to Affalterbach, where the corporate remains to the present day.
By the mid-1980s, AMG was well into its stride and able not only to tune pre-existing product but to try to to so to such an extent that the resulting cars deserved to be thought of as models in their title . The AMG 500SEC of 1984 had four-valve cylinder heads long before any purely Mercedes product, but it might be 1986 before AMG smashed its way into the worldwide automotive psyche with a car that, appropriately enough, would become referred to as ‘The Hammer’.
This was a mid-sized W124 saloon into which AMG had squeezed Mercedes’ largest engine (5.6 litres), but only after fitting its own four-valve heads. One-time Autocar trial editor David Vivian described it thus: “Rapid enough to face down a Ferrari 288 GTO, it might be driven by your granny.” some time past , a rear-drive saloon with a four-speed auto ’box that would nevertheless hit 60mph in 5.0sec flat on its thanks to 183mph was an unprecedented, preposterous achievement.
By 1990, the connection between Mercedes and AMG – which had existed on a much more harmonious basis than many tuning companies and therefore the makers of their donor vehicles – became formalised. This led not only to providing Mercedes with AMG’s credibility but also to enabling AMG to sell its cars through Mercedes dealers with Mercedes-backed warranties. most importantly , however, Mercedes and AMG began to work together on product design.
The very first fruit of those labours was the W202-based C36 AMG of 1993. Today, once you can purchase an AMG C-class with 503bhp, the 276bhp of the C36 won't appear to be much, but some time past it had been enough to place it on near enough equal terms with the E36-generation BMW M3, even if, with softer springs, a better kerb weight and therefore the retention of a four-speed automatic drive , its character was distinctly different. This was an important car, because it set the tone for a whole generation of AMG models to return .
As an adolescent , he’d dreamt of building Mercedes race engines and now, soon after finding employment doing exactly that, the dream was close to be shattered.
A lesser person would have just accepted the inevitable and gone back to putting together road car engines. But not Aufrecht. With a like-minded colleague called Erhard Melcher, he managed to accumulate a 300SE, strip it, raise the facility of its engine from 170bhp to 238bhp and, with Manfred Schiek driving, win ten rounds of the 1965 German phaeton Championship.
News travelled fast and, by the top of the subsequent year, Aufrecht and Melcher were deluged with orders for faster Mercedes, to be used on road or track. So in 1967, they decided to offer up their jobs at Mercedes and found out shop on their own in nearby Burgstall. And within the moment when Aufrecht, Melcher and Aufrecht's hometown of Großaspach came together, AMG was born.
Business came thick and fast. Even Mercedes seemed to realise that it had missed a trick and began releasing more highly tuned versions of its road cars, the 1968 6.3-litre 300SEL to call the foremost obvious example. But what AMG could have interpreted as an effort to tug the rug out from under its feet was instead considered a singular opportunity: however fast and powerful a Mercedes super-saloon could be , AMG backed itself to form it even faster and more powerful.
It took three years, but by the time of the 1971 Spa 24 Hours, a 6.3-litre 300SEL road car with 247bhp had become a 6.8-litre racer with 428bhp. Despite the gasps of crowd and competitors alike at the looks of an outsized red cathedral on the grid, the SEL rumbled around to second place and a category win, outright victory being denied only by a rather frantic pitstop schedule needed to satisfy its appetite for fuel and tyres.
Back to top
Business boomed, boosted by a requirement for custom-made interiors also as engines, and by 1976 it had outgrown the Großaspach premises, prompting a move to Affalterbach, where the corporate remains to the present day.
By the mid-1980s, AMG was well into its stride and able not only to tune pre-existing product but to try to to so to such an extent that the resulting cars deserved to be thought of as models in their title . The AMG 500SEC of 1984 had four-valve cylinder heads long before any purely Mercedes product, but it might be 1986 before AMG smashed its way into the worldwide automotive psyche with a car that, appropriately enough, would become referred to as ‘The Hammer’.
This was a mid-sized W124 saloon into which AMG had squeezed Mercedes’ largest engine (5.6 litres), but only after fitting its own four-valve heads. One-time Autocar trial editor David Vivian described it thus: “Rapid enough to face down a Ferrari 288 GTO, it might be driven by your granny.” some time past , a rear-drive saloon with a four-speed auto ’box that would nevertheless hit 60mph in 5.0sec flat on its thanks to 183mph was an unprecedented, preposterous achievement.
By 1990, the connection between Mercedes and AMG – which had existed on a much more harmonious basis than many tuning companies and therefore the makers of their donor vehicles – became formalised. This led not only to providing Mercedes with AMG’s credibility but also to enabling AMG to sell its cars through Mercedes dealers with Mercedes-backed warranties. most importantly , however, Mercedes and AMG began to work together on product design.
The very first fruit of those labours was the W202-based C36 AMG of 1993. Today, once you can purchase an AMG C-class with 503bhp, the 276bhp of the C36 won't appear to be much, but some time past it had been enough to place it on near enough equal terms with the E36-generation BMW M3, even if, with softer springs, a better kerb weight and therefore the retention of a four-speed automatic drive , its character was distinctly different. This was an important car, because it set the tone for a whole generation of AMG models to return .
