As I sat at home watching the 2026 Nürburgring 24 Hours qualifying on Thursday and Friday, I couldn’t help but reminisce on my whistle-stop tour to HWA a couple of weeks ago. 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 go. 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 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, the company has quietly supported the racing efforts of Mercedes-AMG and Mercedes, particularly in DTM, collecting eight Drivers’ Championship titles along the way. HWA 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. Beyond AMG projects, HWA has been involved in developing the V12 that powers the Pagani Huayra R, and also helping 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 one of the world’s most gruelling 24-hour 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 is not nearing production, HWA announced in June 2025 that they would build a race variant of the car – the EVO.R – and compete in the 2026 Nürburgring 24 Hours race.
When I visited HWA, it was past 6:00pm, but the mechanics were still busy working on the EVO.Rs after a test session at Nürburgring Nordchliefe. Three cars sat on lifts, stripped to various degrees, being tweaked and adjusted by the team.
The EVO.R’s engine is the same as the 3.0-litre Mercedes twin-turbo V6 used on the road car, but is tuned to produce over 550 bhp. 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 car is not merely inspired by the 190E Evo II; it 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 managed to bring to life.
This weekend, the three HWA EVO.Rs are competing in the SPX class, a special category for non-homologated and experimental cars. They are unlikely to be fighting for outright victory, but this is the Nordschleife, and anything can happen there.
But that hasn’t deterred the team in the slightest, as they’ve been putting in long hours both at the track and in the workshop, building cars capable of taking on one of the toughest circuits on the planet for 24 hours straight, and doing it in not much more than 100 days.
