There’s Not Much Mercedes 190E Left In The £600k HWA Evo

It’s been almost a year to the day since we first saw the HWA Evo, an astonishing £600,000 modern-day reinterpretation of the spectacularly bewinged and unwieldily named Mercedes 190E 2.5-16 Evolution II.

To mark this near-anniversary, it’s shared a deep dive into the hardware that’s underpinning this incredible restomod – although the company would rather you didn’t call it that.

“The HWA EVO is far more than just a ‘restomod’,” says HWA’s CTO, Gordian von Schöning. ​​”In order to fully realise our vision for the car we are going to unparalleled lengths in terms of design, engineering and suppliers.”

How unparalleled? Well, considering that the Evo starts off life as a common-or-garden 190E – the sort that would have been used as a taxi in Düsseldorf in the early ’90s, rather than a snorty sports saloon – the changes are pretty drastic. Hope you’ve got an anorak to hand because this is going to get nerdy.

With the donor car stripped back to its bare chassis, HWA plans to throw away the entire front and rear sections and replace them with high-strength aluminium and steel subframes, to which the suspension components can be directly attached. Those components include custom-designed adjustable KW dampers, new H&R anti-roll bars, wishbones derived from the 190E DTM racer and new billet-machined wheel carriers.

Further modifications include shuffling the front axle 50mm forward and slinging the gearbox right out back in a transaxle layout. This allows the new 3.0-litre twin-turbo V6 – making 443bhp as standard, or 493bhp with the optional Affalterbach performance pack – to butt right up against the cabin in an essentially front-mid-engined layout. That, together with the repositioned ’box, contributes to a 50/50 weight distribution.

Overall, around 75 per cent of the original chassis is done away with, but what does remain – essentially just the pillars and roof – is massively strengthened. Overall, torsional stiffness is more than doubled.

Clothing the naked chassis is new bodywork that superficially resembles that of the original 190E Evo, but is, in fact, full carbon fibre, including two single-piece items which make up the entire front and rear ends.

Finishing touches are Brembo brakes, with either steel or carbon-ceramic compounds, totally bespoke ESP and ABS systems and a new ECU being developed by Bosch, something von Schöning says “is unheard of for a bespoke, low-volume manufacturer.”

Despite all that, HWA might still struggle to get people to stop calling it a restomod.