HWA’s 190 Evo Was Just The Start, Now It’s Ready To Create An ICE Hypercar

Of all the reimagined neo-classics we’ve come across in the last couple of years, HWA’s Evo is among the greatest. Put that down to the basic rightness of the engineering and design, the emotional draw of the donor car and also the pedigree of the company behind it.

For more than quarter of a century HWA has built and run race cars at the highest levels, created engines for supercar icons and entire supercars for automakers, often while receiving next to no public credit.

But the German outfit has had enough of being kingmaker. Now it wants to be king, and the 190-based supersedan is only the first step in a journey that will culminate in it releasing its own hypercar before the end of this decade.

Also: HWA’s Reimagined Mercedes 190E EVO II Looks Just As Good Under The Skin

In case you’re familiar with the Evo but not the people behind it, here’s a little cheat sheet. The H, W and A in HWA stand for Hans Werner Aufrecht, who co-founded AMG in the 1960s and began formally collaborating with Mercedes in the 1990s before selling AMG to Benz at the end of that decade. HWA was founded in 1998 and continued handling AMG’s race programs and undertaking special projects like the CLK GTR Strassenversion long after the buyout.

But a decision a few years ago by Mercedes to take motorsport development in-house left HWA without one of its biggest gigs. And so, with time on its hands, it put some real effort into a project it had already been kicking around on paper. That project was the Evo, a €776,000 ($887,000), plus tax, 21st century interpretation of the 190 Evolution II Aufrecht’s AMG deployed to win Germany’s prestigious DTM series in 1992.

More Mercedes-Based Heroes On The Way

Production gets underway next year at the rate of one car per week, with all 100 examples scheduled to be completed by the end of 2027. But while that is happening, HWA’s 300-strong team will also be deep in development for its next projects. The first (and possibly the second) is inspired by different Mercedes motorsport heroes of the 1990s.

In a conversation with Carscoops, HWA’s CTO, Gordian von Schöning, was coy about exactly which car was getting the HWA treatment next, but hinted that it would be “very similar” to the EVO.

Assuming HWA isn’t just talking about refining and developing the 190-based car, one contender could be the W202 C-Class that replaced the 190. It proved even more successful in DTM, securing back-to-back championship wins in 1995 and 1996 when it also took home gold in the inaugural International Touring Car Championship.

But HWA must surely also be looking at the CLK DTMs it built and campaigned successfully in the first half of the 2000s when DTM returned after a brief absence as a silhouette formula.

Next Cars Swap V6 for V8

Whatever the next car due in a couple of years is, we know it’ll have V8 power. Von Schöning is adamant that the 493 hp (500 PS) 3.0-liter bi-turbo V6 in the EVO is the right engine for the car (more powerful than an original 190E 2.5-16’s four; much lighter than a V8) and, unlike many inadequately developed and tested tuner engines, it make its advertised outputs day-in, day-out even in extreme conditions because it’s been subjected to automaker-type levels of scrutiny.

Nevertheless, he admits that some buyers have expressed disappointment at the number of horses and cylinders, bemoaning that their EVs have more on-paper muscle, though he promises the behind-the-wheel experience won’t leave anyone feeling letdown.

So a V8 is guaranteed for the Evo’s successor, but what is guaranteed not to be there is any kind of hybrid help. Neither it, or any HWA for the foreseeable future, will feature electric or hybrid power, and not because HWA is unfamiliar with the tech; quite the opposite, in fact, as it has worked for multiple seasons in Formula E.

“Don’t get me wrong, I like electric cars, they have a purpose,” says Von Schöning who started out at Mercedes HPE and worked at BMW M between his two stints at HWA.

“They’re good from A to B and they they have quick acceleration. But if you ask me to build a car at a high price level for emotions, I would not choose an electric powertrain. At some point for homologation and street legality you will end up with a hybrid system, but for now we don’t need it,” he added.

Related: HWA’s Modern Mercedes 190E Evo Gets Twin-Turbo V6, Carbon Skin, And KW Dampers

HWA Enters The Hypercar Arena

That news takes on even greater significance when you consider what HWA has coming a little further down the line. Having used the Evo as a shop window to get people who aren’t motorsport buffs familiar with the HWA brand and to show the depth of engineering excellence it can deliver, the Affalterbach-based company is moving into more extreme territory.

“Maybe there’s also other cars [still to come] with a look and feel of Mercedes, but at some point it is just logical that we are doing our own super hypercar,” admits von Schöning. This secret exotic won’t be based on a past or current Mercedes but a clean-sheet design that’s all HWA’s own work.

One of the organizations biggest strengths is that it can handle almost any part of a car project from basic design right through to low-volume manufacturing. It’s already done it for other brands, but in less than five years from now it’ll be doing it for itself. This spring HWA applied to the German authorities to become a car manufacturer in its own right and is close to having the approval signed off.

Von Schöning wouldn’t be drawn on the specifics of the hypercar, its current marketing focus being finding clients to fill the last remaining Evo build slots. But we’d put money on at least a 12-cylinder head count, HWA having already developed a 6.0-liter V12 for Pagani’s Huyara and both Aston Martin’s Valkyrie and GMA’s T.50, proving that seriously rich customers value emotion and power to weight over outright power.

Homologation Could Be A Pain

Though HWA undoubtedly has the technical expertise to design a car like this and make it (it already builds the P72 for De Tomaso) the legal hurdles might prove tougher. Building the EVO around a donor 190, even though very little of the original is retained, means it can legally use the old car’s registration documents, thereby exempting it from modern crash and emissions rules (US customers have to buy a car in the US and ship it to Europe for conversion).

But there’s no such loophole when you’re building a car from scratch on a brand new monocoque, meaning big bills for homologation, though HWA says it already carried out crash test simulations on the 190E anyway, and modified it to make it safer. That isn’t something you get with a regular restomod. Von Schöning says the EVO is way beyond one of those, by the way, and we’re inclined to agree.

On the subject of big bills, while the price is still TBC, it’s sure to be in the millions. HWA initially thought it was being punchy asking €700,000+ for the EVO but soon realized it could have got away with an even bigger sticker, and that was before the brand received the widespread exposure the 190 brought.

A hypercar from the same team could really put HWA on the map and disrupt the supercar game the way Pagani’s first car did over 25 years ago. It’ll also be another way to hook in customers for the engineering and contract-manufacturing “pillars” of the business it has no plans on abandoning – including work for AMG, who has been very supportive of HWA’s new direction.

“We were kind of a hidden champion, winning so many races, developing, building and running cars, but not really allowed to tell about it,” says von Schöning of HWA’s first 27 years.

“I was wearing jackets with a Mercedes Benz logo, we felt like Mercedes employees and we were happy to do it. But now that we are doing our own stuff, we would like to have our own jackets and build our own brand up.”

Note: the lead image of this story is a CLK GTR Roadster, which HWA built in tiny numbers for Mercedes more than 20 years ago, and which RM Sotheby’s sold for over $10.2 million in 2023. We use it only for illustrative purposes with the Mercedes grille star deleted, not because it’s representative of how HWA’s new hypercar will look – though it wouldn’t be a bad place to start (credit: Neil Fraser/RM Sotheby’s).