As I sat at home watching the Nürburgring 24 Hours qualifying last week, I couldn’t help but reminisce on a recent whistle-stop tour to HWA. Following Ultrace Germany, which has been covered extensively by Mario and Larry, I spent a couple of days visiting some amazing places that all petrolheads would love to visit. One such place was HWA in Affalterbach, just outside Stuttgart, where I managed to sneak in thanks to Gordian, Alex, and Florian.
Affalterbach is famous for being the home of Mercedes-AMG, the tuning arm of Mercedes-Benz, so it feels fitting that HWA AG would set up shop here, too. But there’s more to the connection than that. HWA are the initials of Hans-Werner Aufrecht, a former Mercedes engineer who went on to establish AMG with Erhard Melcher. The exploits of AMG are well known, especially its racing successes throughout the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s.
When AMG became the in-house tuning arm of Mercedes-Benz around 1988/1989 (now Mercedes-AMG), Hans established HWA AG, becoming to AMG what AMG had once been to Mercedes – essentially its motorsport offshoot.
Since its establishment, HWA has quietly supported the racing efforts of Mercedes-AMG and Mercedes, particularly in DTM, collecting eight Drivers’ Championship titles along the way. The company has also built several road cars, including the street versions of the CLK GTR, CLK DTM AMG, and SL 65 AMG Black Series, to name a few. And beyond AMG projects, HWA has been involved in developing the V12 that powers the Pagani Huayra R, and also helped develop the Apollo Intensa Emozione.
At the end of 2025, Mercedes-AMG Motorsport Customer Racing was brought in-house, releasing HWA AG from its exclusive contract with Mercedes-AMG. So what better way to race under its own banner than by taking on the Nürburgring 24 Hours – one of the world’s most gruelling endurance races? HWA might sound like a new team, but they have experience and share the same DNA as AMG, which puts them at the forefront of DTM and endurance racing.
HWA introduced the HWA EVO at the end of 2023 as a restomod based on the 190E and inspired by the 190E Evo II. As the road car neared production, HWA announced in June 2025 that they would build a motorsport variant – the EVO.R – and debut it at the 2026 Nürburgring 24 Hours race.
When I visited HWA a few weeks ago, three EVO.Rs sat on lifts, stripped to various degrees. It was past 6:00pm, but the mechanics were still busy working on the cars after a test session at the Nürburgring Nordchliefe.
The EVO.R’s engine is the same as the 3.0-litre Mercedes twin-turbo V6 used in the HWA EVO road car, but is tuned to produce over 550bhp. As you’d expect, most of the improvements made to the race car are mechanical and functional. The first of the three cars is wrapped in a retro Karcher and Sonax livery, as used in DTM. The second car sported the dark green colours of the sponsor, Parkside, while the third car was plain black when I visited, but now sports artwork by Hanna Schönwald
It’s surreal to see a team with so much history and experience build a race car based on a limited-production road car, itself a restomod of a 1980s Mercedes. It’s a bit of a mouthful, but while so many teams trade on heritage and history, HWA AG has genuine provenance stretching back to the 1960s with Mercedes-AMG, and has been relentlessly competing and winning ever since.
The HWA EVO is not merely inspired by the 190E Evo II; it also uses the same basic chassis, albeit reworked and improved. It’s not history for history’s sake, but rather a modern interpretation that the team has genuinely brought to life.
Last weekend, the three HWA EVO.Rs competed in the SPX class, a special category at the Nürburgring 24 Hours for non-homologated and experimental cars. While HWA didn’t go into the race gunning for outright victory, it didn’t deter the team in the slightest.
But the result was remarkable. All three EVO.Rs finished the race, securing second, third, and fourth in class behind the BMW M3 Touring 24H. Simply making it to the start line with cars developed in roughly 100 days was an achievement in itself, but producing a result like this elevated it to another level entirely.
