Enjoy These Pictures Of The HWA Evo In A Retro DTM-Inspired Livery

We’ve just had one famously gruelling round-the-clock endurance race, and there’s another one coming up in less than a week, when a pack of 141 cars line up for the 2025 Nürburgring 24 Hours.

The fearsome Nürburgring, of course, has played host to many a legendary race series, but possibly our favourite was when the DTM German touring car championship visited the track in its glorious, mostly two-wheeled early ’90s heyday.

One of the stars of that era was the enormously-winged Mercedes 190E 2.5-16 Evo II, a car that’s being revived in restomod form by Mercedes-AMG-affiliated racing outfit HWA. It’s only fitting, then, that that restomod – the HWA Evo – is being given its dynamic debut at the Nordschleife ahead of the big race.

Though the Evo does start life as a cooking 190E, there’s not much of the donor car left in it. The engine is a new 3.0-litre twin-turbo V6 with up to 493bhp, the bodywork is full carbon fibre, and basically all that’s left from the original car are the roof and door pillars.

All this is well and good, but the real reason we wanted to draw your attention to this dynamic debut is the wonderful retro DTM-style livery one of the Evos will be running for its demo laps.

It’s very clearly inspired by the Sonax livery worn by the 190E Evo that Klaus Ludwig drove to the DTM championship in 1992, and we cannot stress enough that there should be more ’90s DTM-inspired cars around. We’re salivating just thinking about the white-and-yellow Opel Calibra that ran a couple of years later.

That’s not all, either – a second car will be running in an equally cool paint job, a new take on Silberdistel – Silver Thistle – an iconic pale green colour worn by Mercs in the 1970s and ’80s. It has shades of R34 Nissan Skyline Millennium Jade, and this is about as big a complement as we can pay to a colour.

Elsewhere, HWA is promising to reveal more about where the Evo project is headed next over the N24 weekend. We’re all ears.