AMG celebrates 50 years of snorting good fun
Company revives Mercedes-Benz’s motorsports history
AMG didn’t start as a posh brand, but as a greasy dream.
Fifty years ago, two diehard German racers who also happened to be engineers, HansWerner Aufrecht and Erhard Melcher, set up shop in an old mill and began tinkering with Mercedes-Benz cars with the singular mission of making them racing beasts.
Their company, AMG, took their last name initials and added Grossaspach, the German village where Aufrecht was born.
AMG quickly became synonymous first with speed and victories (such as the 300 SEL nicknamed the Red Pig, which took first at the 1971 24 Hours of Spa), and later with highly tuned versions of standard Mercedes models (the now iconic 1986 AMG 300E was nicknamed “The Hammer” for its 190-mph top speed).
Mercedes-Benz executives quickly saw that AMG was sprinkling some serious magic dust on its otherwise staid products, and in 2005 AMG officially became part of the Mercedes empire.
The match was a natural. Beyond AMG’s headquarters — Affalterbach being but a few miles from Mercedes’ Stuttgart home — there’s the fact that Aufrecht and Melcher had quietly revived a once sparkling Mercedes motorsports history that had instantly gone dark after a hellish 1955 In 1989, AMG succeeded in giving a sedan sports-car performance with the 300 E 6.0, nicknamed “The Hammer” for its outrageous speed.
crash of a Mercedes race car at Le Mans, which killed more than 80 people.
“For us, it’s a win-win,” says Heiko Schmidt, head of AMG, which now produces an array of models under the company name Mercedes-AMG. “We make ‘halo cars,’ which are emotional and dealers love the extra profitability, and we also produce other cars that make the whole Mercedes brand look better.”
Halo cars are the models that steal owners’ hearts with their rarity, cutting-edge styling and power, even if automakers know they will sell relatively few of them because of their impracticality — meaning extreme sports cars — or inflated price tags.
From those standpoints, AMG fits right in.
In the early days, owning a Mercedes AMG was an exclusive affair — and it still is if you shell out more money for an AMG variant that offers up the company’s trademark “one man, one engine” power plant, meaning it’s built by a single worker.
But in a nod to what BMW is doing with its M branded cars, consumers now are able to buy into the AMG mythos with Mercedes vehicles that offer sporting tweaks to standard models,not full AMG makeovers, for a modest uptick in price.
For example, at the low end sits the CLA 45 sedan at around $50,000, while on the upper end resides the mighty AMG GT at around $150,000 and up. And that’s not to mention MercedesAMG’s coming hypercar, the Formula 1-spec, $2.4 million Project ONE due in mid-2019.