Five separate performance brands

Friday, 10 August 2018

More than just a badge - here are five manufacturers with separate performance brands.

Performance is a serious business in the car industry and most manufacturers have a performance arm to spice up their standard models, such as BMW does with M Performance and Audi does with Audi Sport.

But some take it further than that and spin off entirely separate performance brands. Today we look at five.

Cupra

Seat has only just arrived in New Zealand, but it now has a separate performance brand to sell as well.

Spanish VW-owned brand Seat is the latest to kick off a separate performance brand with the recent creation of Cupra.

Previously a model designation on sporty road-going Seats, Cupra is also the company's motorsport division (originally formed as Seat Sport in 1985) and has been quite successful in European rallying.

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It has dabbled in the WRC, touring cars and even GT racing, with the superbly aggressive-looking Seat Cupra GT from 2003.

The first stand-alone Cupra model is set to land here next year and is… an SUV. But a pretty serious SUV - the Cupra Ateca will pack the 221kW engine from the Seat Leon Cupra.

Polestar

It only lasted for a few years, but SRT was once a separate brand. It only ever sold the Viper.

Much like Mercedes' AMG brand, Polestar started life as an external entity that was absorbed by Volvo and has now been spun off as a separate performance brand.

Unlike AMG however, Polestar began as a racing team (Flash Engineering) that raced Volvo's built by Tom Walkinshaw Racing and Prodrive before being rebranded as Polestar, eventually becoming a 'partner' developing hot road-going Volvos.

Fiat revived the evocative Abarth name as a separate brand and it has produced some superbly mad fast 500s.

Volvo absorbed the Polestar brand in 2015 before spinning it off as a separate brand dedicated to electric performance cars.

Interestingly, Volvo only actually bought the 'Polestar Performance' and 'Polestar' brands, with the racing team continuing separately after being renamed Cyan Racing.

SRT

Mercedes-AMG is sort of a separate brand, but it is the only one that actually makes its own cars, including the F1-derived Project One hypercar.

Back in 2012 Chrysler announced a plan to spin SRT (Street & Racing Technology) off into a separate performance brand, with the mighty Dodge Viper as its flagship.

The Viper was sold as the SRT Viper for 2013 and 2014, but then Chrysler went all cold on the idea and re-absorbed the brand back into Dodge and it went back to being a badge on silly-fast Dodge, Chrysler and Jeep vehicles like the Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat and the Jeep Grand Cherokee SRT Trackhawk, not to mention the wonderfully mental Dodge Challenger SRT Demon, the only road legal production car that lifts its front wheels under acceleration…

Abarth

Former Cisitalia sporting director formed his own racing team out of the wreckage of the collapsed Italian brand in 1949 and by 1952 Abarth & C. S.p.A. started its association with Fiat when it built the utterly superb Abarth 1500 Biposto using Fiat mechanicals.

Fiat bought Abarth in 1971 and moved the racing efforts away from hillclimb and GT racing into rallying, before absorbing the company into its Fiat Auto Gestione Sportiva racing operation in 1981, meaning the evocative brand simply became a trim level on mildly warm Fiats.

Fiat revived Abarth as a separate company in 2007 and it now produces wonderfully mental versions of the Fiat 500 as well as a sublimely good version of the 124 Spyder.

Mercedes-AMG

Yep, really, this one counts. In fact Mercedes-AMG is the only separate performance brand here that has actually made its own car, rather than use existing models made by their parent company (or others, in the case of Abarth).

AMG developed the Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG, as well as the current Mercedes-AMG GT and the F1 car-engined Project One hypercar.

AMG started life as an independent engineering company that specialised in powering up Mercedes vehicles, before being bought entirely by Daimler in 2005.

As well as its Mercedes activities, AMG also supplies Pagani with engines and is in a 'technical partnership' with Aston Martin, supplying the British brand with V8 engines, as well as electronic architecture.