AMG GT

The Second Time AMG Built a Car From Nothing

When Mercedes-AMG unveiled a low, wide, impossibly long-hooded coupe on 9 September 2014, the shape was one reason it mattered. The other was what the car was not: a warmed-over Mercedes-Benz. For most of AMG's history as a tuning house turned in-house performance division, that distinction hadn't mattered much, because nearly everything AMG built started life as somebody else's car (a C-Class, an E-Class, an SL) reworked with a bigger engine, stiffer suspension, and a badge. The SLS AMG, launched in 2010 with gullwing doors borrowed in spirit from the 300 SL, had been the first real break from that pattern, described in AMG's own account as the first car designed, engineered and substantially built by AMG itself, even though its aluminum body and chassis were actually produced by Magna Steyr in Austria and its final assembly happened at Mercedes-Benz's Sindelfingen plant rather than at AMG's own home in Affalterbach. The GT, unveiled four years later, went a step further: a genuinely new architecture under a genuinely new AMG-designed engine, with no major Mercedes-Benz componentry underneath the skin. Wikipedia and autoevolution both describe it as AMG's second ground-up model rather than its first. The distinction between first and second only matters because it tells you how recently AMG had actually finished becoming its own carmaker rather than Mercedes-Benz's tuning shop.

The engineering underneath earned that framing. At the heart of the new coupe sat a twin-turbocharged 4.0-litre V8, internally documented as the first sports-car engine in this segment with its turbochargers mounted inside the engine's V, in a 'hot inside V' layout paired with dry-sump lubrication to keep the car's centre of gravity low. When the GT and GT S went on sale in March 2015, they arrived rated at 462 hp and 503 hp respectively by widely reported figures. Those numbers would climb again at the car's 2017 facelift, when the range gained a GT C in between and, at the top, a GT R nicknamed, in AMG's own marketing language, the 'Beast of the Green Hell.' The name had a result behind it. In a lap recorded around 2016 and formally confirmed by Mercedes-Benz the following spring, a GT R driven by Sport Auto's Christian Gebhardt covered the Nürburgring Nordschleife in 7 minutes 10.9 seconds, at the time reported as the fastest lap ever set by a rear-wheel-drive production sports car, ahead of both a Dodge Viper ACR and a Lexus LFA Nürburgring Package. AMG's own release does not dwell on the fact that Gebhardt was a working journalist, not a factory racing driver. Three and a half years later, in November 2020, AMG went back to the same 20.8-kilometre circuit with an even more extreme derivative, the track-focused GT Black Series, and beat its own family's record: 6:43.616, an officially notarized and certified time, this time set by Maro Engel, an active Mercedes-AMG GT3 racing driver rather than a magazine tester. That detail, in its own quiet way, says something about how thin the line between AMG's road cars and its race cars had become by the end of the C190's run.

That line was thin by design. Mercedes-AMG had been running a factory-supported customer racing programme since 2010, and the GT3 version of the new coupe, unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show within days of the road car's own on-sale date in March 2015, was explicitly framed as AMG's second in-house customer racing car, following directly from an SLS AMG GT3 that had already delivered real results, including a 2013 Bathurst 12 Hour win for Erebus Motorsport with Bernd Schneider, Thomas Jager and Alexandre Roloff sharing the car, and, that same May, the marque's first-ever outright win at the Nürburgring 24 Hours. The winning car was Black Falcon's #9 SLS AMG GT3, driven by Schneider, Jeroen Bleekemolen, Sean Edwards and Nicki Thiim, through a race suspended for more than nine hours by heavy rain. The new GT3 shipped to its first customer teams by the end of 2015, and it did not take long to prove itself: in its first full season, at the 2016 ADAC Zurich 24-hour race at the same Nürburgring, AMG-Team BLACK FALCON's Mercedes-AMG GT3, driven by Maro Engel, Bernd Schneider, Adam Christodoulou and Manuel Metzger, took the overall win outright, with Engel passing Audi's Christian Hohenadel on the final lap. The race had been halted under red flag conditions for roughly four hours that Saturday afternoon by an unseasonal hailstorm severe enough to trigger a string of crashes. Mercedes-AMG GT3 entries filled four of the top five finishing positions behind the winners, and trade press at the time called it the biggest single-race result in the marque's customer racing history to that point. Mercedes-AMG would not win that race outright again for a decade: the next overall victory came in May 2026, when the #80 Winward Racing entry, liveried as Mercedes-AMG Team RAVENOL and driven by Engel (now a two-time Nürburgring 24 Hours winner) alongside Luca Stolz, Fabian Schiller and Maxime Martin, started 25th in the race's largest-ever field of 161 cars and worked back to the front for the marque's third outright Nürburgring 24 Hours win, following the 2013 SLS-era result and the 2016 GT3 win described above.

The GT3 kept winning as the car aged. A GT4 version, aimed at a lower rung of amateur customer racing and built from GT R hardware (roughly 510 PS from the same 4.0-litre biturbo V8, at a claimed curb weight near 1,390 kilograms), was revealed ahead of the 2017 24 Hours of Spa, widening AMG's customer racing ladder from grassroots club racing up through full GT3 competition. Outright Bathurst 12 Hour wins for the GT-based GT3, as distinct from the earlier SLS-based car, arrived in 2022, when Triple Eight Race Engineering's entry (Jules Gounon, Kenny Habul, Martin Konrad and Luca Stolz) took the chequered flag, and again in 2023, when the SunEnergy1 AKKodis ASP Team's updated GT3 Evo, with much the same driver lineup, repeated the result. Across the Pacific, in IMSA's GT Daytona class, Mercedes-AMG's own account of the 2024 season describes its customer teams, led by Winward Racing, sweeping all six available GTD championships between the WeatherTech and Michelin Endurance Cup series, and IMSA's own reporting on the 2026 Rolex 24 lineup confirms Winward carried its GTD team title into a second consecutive season in 2025. None of this touches Mercedes' Formula 1 programme, which is a different division, a different set of regulations, and, deliberately, no part of this car's story: the GT3 and GT4 programmes are production-derived customer racing, run by independent teams in cars a paying customer can actually buy, and that is squarely what makes them relevant here.

Behind the badge, the GT's development had a name attached to it for most of its life: Tobias Moers, who had joined AMG in 1994, taken responsibility for its main model line by 1999, held overall charge of vehicle development from 2002, and become AMG's chairman and chief executive in October 2013, less than a year before the GT's unveiling. He combined that executive role with AMG's chief technical leadership through the car's entire development and launch window. Moers left AMG in August 2020 to become CEO of Aston Martin, a departure that closed out the period during which one person had effectively owned both the business decisions and the engineering direction behind the GT's creation, and it is a reasonable marker for where the C190 generation's story, as a piece of automotive history, begins to end: production of the roadster wound down in 2021, and after a run of increasingly extreme specials (Black Series, Track Series) carried the coupe into 2022, the first-generation GT closed out roughly nine years on sale. A model overview published by all-andorra.com puts production for that whole run at around 18,900 units.

The GT's second generation arrived on 19 August 2023, unveiled at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance, a rather different kind of stage from the original's Paris Motor Show debut. It made clear immediately that this was a heavier, more grand-touring-oriented car than its predecessor. Built on the same platform architecture as the new SL roadster rather than the first GT's own bespoke structure, the second-generation coupe launched with GT 55 and GT 63 variants, both four-wheel drive, both making meaningfully more power than the base C190 ever had, before the range grew further in 2024 with a plug-in-hybrid GT 63 S E Performance (combining a hand-built V8 with a rear-mounted electric motor for a reported combined output above 800 hp) and, at the other end, a four-cylinder mild-hybrid GT 43. It is worth being precise about one thing the AMG GT range includes that is not, strictly, the same car described in the rest of this story: since 2018, Mercedes-AMG has also sold a GT 63 4-Door Coupe, internally coded X290, which wears the same badge and a broadly similar face but sits on the MRA platform shared with the E-Class and CLS. Structurally it is a close cousin of the AMG E 63 sedan, not a stretched version of the two-seat sports car. It continued to be updated and marketed alongside the second-generation two-seat GT through 2023, and its sales figures, quite deliberately, are not folded into any of the two-seat production numbers discussed above.

What connects both generations, and both the road cars and the race cars, is a simple claim: the GT was the point at which Mercedes-AMG stopped being primarily a tuner of somebody else's cars and became, in a way it could point to with its own engine, its own architecture, and its own customer racing wins, a car company in its own right. The SLS had made the first attempt at that distinction; the GT, and everything built from its platform and its racing programme over the decade since, made the argument stick.