Sometimes good news comes in curious forms. For Hans-Werner Aufrecht, the decision by Mercedes-Benz to withdraw from all forms of racing for 1965 must have seemed a disaster.
As a teenager, he’d dreamt of building Mercedes race engines and now, soon after finding employment doing exactly that, the dream was about to be shattered.
A lesser person would have just accepted the inevitable and gone back to building road car engines. But not Aufrecht. With a like-minded colleague called Erhard Melcher, he managed to acquire a 300SE, strip it, raise the power of its engine from 170bhp to 238bhp and, with Manfred Schiek driving, win ten rounds of the 1965 German Touring Car Championship.
News travelled fast and, by the end of the following year, Aufrecht and Melcher were deluged with orders for faster Mercedes, for use on road or track. So in 1967, they decided to give up their jobs at Mercedes and set up shop on their own in nearby Burgstall. And in the moment when Aufrecht, Melcher and Aufrecht's hometown of Großaspach came together, AMG was born.
Business came thick and fast. Even Mercedes appeared to realise that it had missed a trick and started releasing more highly tuned versions of its road cars, the 1968 6.3-litre 300SEL to name the most obvious example. But what AMG could have interpreted as an attempt to pull the rug out from under its feet was instead regarded as a unique opportunity: however fast and powerful a Mercedes super-saloon might be, AMG backed itself to make it even faster and more powerful.
It took three years, but by the time of the 1971 Spa 24 Hours, a 6.3-litre 300SEL road car with 247bhp had become a 6.8-litre race car with 428bhp. Despite the gasps of crowd and competitors alike at the appearance of a large red cathedral on the grid, the SEL rumbled around to second place and a class win, outright victory being denied only by a rather frantic pitstop schedule needed to satisfy its appetite for fuel and tyres.
Business boomed, boosted by a demand for custom-made interiors as well as engines, and by 1976 it had outgrown the Großaspach premises, prompting a move to Affalterbach, where the company remains to this day.
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Granada Mk2 wheels company?
I was first made aware of AMG when the local boys used to upgrade the wheels on their Granada 2.8i Ghias to AMG 5 spokes. I think the wheel stud pattern matched the Fords so they were an easy fit, must say they did look good on the Granada Mk2 back in the day. Other than that a fun company to "watch" and they obviously know a thing or two about engine building (and exhaust tuning) but I have never really yearned for any of their products. Good on 'em.
Nearly as good as Pimp my