n It has the wrong engine. Still, there’ s much to celebrate about HWA bringing the Mercedes-Benz 190E back into high-profile racing. The HWA Evo. R will be competing at the 2026 Nürburgring 24.

Firstly, HWA deserves your respect and is the right business to reinvent the 190E as a modern-day racer. It has ties with Mercedes, right back to when it was formed in 1998; it developed and raced the C Class DTM cars. By 2018, eleven drivers’ titles had been won by the pair, more than any other team. HWA then teamed with Mercedes- AMG on the SLS and GT customer GT3 racecars. It has also had a hand in some of Mercedes’ most exclusive road cars, including the CLK-GTR Roadster, the CLK-DTM AMG and the SL65 AMG Black Series. If that wasn’ t enough, HWA are the initials of its founder’ s

name: Hans Werner Aufrecht. His last name is the A in AMG.

The 190E’ s return will happen at the Nürburgring, too, the place that’ s most alive with car culture. It’ s also the only place where such a car would be eligible for a bigticket event. The circuit’ s day-long race has such a wide variety of categories thanks to relatively open experimental classes. In recent years, we’ ve seen Nineties BMW 3 Series Compacts on track with modern GT3 cars. The HWA Evo is a guaranteed fan favourite and will enter the SP-X class.

You will recognise the drivers’ names, too: Ludwig and Asch. Not the 1992 DTM champion, who won in a 190E 25.16 Evo 2, Klaus Ludwig. Or Roland Asch, who campaigned a 190E for six seasons of DTM, taking silver in the drivers’ standings twice. No, their sons Luca

Ludwig and Sebastian Asch. They will be joined by three-time N24 winner Markus Winkelhock, whose uncle, Joachim, might be better associated with BMW in DTM, but did a few races in a 190E too.

The Evo. R racecar is based on HWA’ s 190E restomod, which takes the basis of an ordinary 190E, adds a hidden roll cage and clothes it in full carbonfibre bodywork to make it look like an extreme version of a 2.5 16 Evo 2. Already an extreme version of the Eighties saloon. It’ s claimed that the HWA Evo has‘ over 450hp’, but sadly not from a screaming 16-valve four cylinder fed by barking throttle bodies. Instead, it has a 3-litre twin-turbo Mercedes V6. So while it will look the part, go exceptionally well and be terrific to watch, it won’ t make the Eifel forest echo with quite the right noises.

HWA is turning its 190E restomod, the EVO, into an N24 racecar