Insight: The New Chapter in Mercedes-AMG’s Customer Racing Story
Sportscar365 explores how and why Mercedes-AMG will take customer racing activities in-house with new company…
In just a few days’ time, 2025 will tick over into 2026 and with it, one of endurance racing’s most successful partnerships that you might not have heard of will come to an end.
For 15 years, HWA AG was the backbone of Mercedes-AMG’s customer racing division. In its own words, HWA was “more than just a technical service provider.” It was responsible for engineering, manufacturing, on-site support and much more. It arguably laid the groundwork for what GT3 customer racing is today.
Starting in 2026, that all changes as Mercedes-AMG takes its customer racing in-house with its newly established Affalterbach Racing GmbH company. The creation of this subsidiary, which has also been tasked with developing the successor to the highly successful Mercedes-AMG GT3 Evo, was first announced in the summer of 2024.
According to Mercedes-AMG motorsport head Christoph Sagemueller, the work to set up this company began much earlier.
“We started setting up the company in 2023,” he tells Sportscar365. “When we officially launched the company the base structure was already done. With the announcement, the focus was really on finding the right staff, hiring the right staff, jumping into the development of the GT3 successor right away. This was actually priority number one. And then followed by all the operations, testing, after-sales. This was actually the structure.”
By going solo, Mercedes-AMG is opting to wind down one of the most successful partnerships in modern motorsport. The two companies are deeply linked, going back as far as HWA’s founding in the late 1990s when Daimler Chrysler acquired a majority stake in AMG and a new, separate company was set up to oversee motorsport activities.
This was HWA, with those letters referring to founder Hans Werner Aufrecht, who also originally established AMG along with Erhard Melcher in 1967.