Five Things: AMG fast facts
Monday, 29 June 2020
Mercedes-AMG cars are well-known as serious performance beasts with lashings of luxury and power to burn, but how much do you know about the company that started it all?
No, not Mercedes-Benz, but AMG - the small race engine builder that would become the serious performance arm of the German giant. Today we take a look at five things you might not have known about AMG.
Started as a tuner
AMG was born in 1967 as AMG Motorenbau und Entwicklungsgesellschaft mbH (AMG Engine Production and Development, Ltd) when former Mercedes-Benz engineers Hans Werner Aufrecht and Erhard Melcher teamed up to build race engines.
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Aufrecht was the 'A' in AMG, Melcher was the 'M' and, for some reason, the 'G' stands for Grossaspach, the small village Aufrecht was born in not, as is often believed, where AMG was first based.
After a few years concentrating on designing and testing race engines, AMG started dabbling in performance parts and accessories for Mercedes-Benz road cars and, by the early 1970s, tuned custom Mercedes models.
The Red Pig
In the early years of its existence, AMG ran a Mercedes-Benz 300SEL 6.3 V8 saloon (bored out to 6.9 litres) affectionately known as 'The Red Pig' in the European Touring Car Championship, as well as the 1971 Spa 24 Hours, where it finished second.
The mighty 300 SEL 6.3 was created by in his own time by Erich Waxenberger, a Mercedes engineer who stuffed the 6.3-litre V8 from the huge Mercedes-Benz 600 limo into the much smaller six-cylinder SEL body, creating a true muscle car that Mercedes actually built and sold.
At the end of its racing career, AMG sold The Red Pig to French company Matra which used it to test jet fighter landing gear. Really.
There was a diesel one
While it is most commonly associated with big V8s, AMG has also dabbled in diesel on occasion.
In 2002 AMG built the C 30 CDI that packed a 3.0-litre five-cylinder turbo diesel engine that produced an admittedly pretty impressive 170kW of power and 540Nm of torque.
It didn't sell well and was quietly dropped when the V8 C 55 came along in 2004.
While the C 30 was the only diesel AMG production car, the company had an earlier brush with diesel back in the 1980s with the Spanish-built MB100 van that it tweaked with a body kit and a few other bits and pieces.
There were Mitsubishi ones
Just before AMG got even cosier with Mercedes-Benz it actually played around with a couple of… wait for it… Mitsubishis!
The first was the very rare and blatantly 1980s Debonair V3000 Royale AMG from 1987 that was basically a normal Debonair with an overwhelming amount of plastic body kit slapped on it.
But the second one was a bit more special - the Galant AMG built between 1989 and 1991 actually had AMG tweaks to its 2.0-litre naturally-aspirated engine, enabling it to rev out to an impressive 8,000rpm and boosting its power from 97kW up to 127kW.
Mitsubishi only ever built around 500 Galant AMGs.
Bought by Daimler
After decades of tuning up Mercedes-Benz vehicles, AMG signed a deal with Daimler-Benz AG in 1993 to develop vehicles together and also allow AMG access to Mercedes-Benz's dealer network.
On the 1st of January 1999 DaimlerChrysler, as it was then called, bought up a controlling stake (51 per cent) in AMG and the company was renamed Mercedes-AMG GmbH.
The racing engine development side of the company was sold off and continues to exist under the name HWA (Aufrecht's initials).
Then six years later on the 1st of January 2005 Aufrecht sold his remaining shares making Mercedes-AMG a wholly-owned subsidiary of Daimler AG (as it is now known).