Back in the late 1970's, when Mercedes-Benz was building rather successful rally versions of the Mercedes-Benz SLC (C107), the mental engineering duo from AMG (Hans Werner Aufrecht and Erhard Melcher) was still independent from the three-pointed star.
Despite this, they only worked on Mercedes-Benz vehicles, transforming them into racing behemoths such as the wide-body 450 SLC in the photo gallery bellow.
Built by AMG to compete not in rally but in the European Touring Car Championship (ETCC), the highly-slimmed coupe was tipping the scales at just a little over 1200 kg (2645 pounds).
Its 4.5-liter engine was naturally-aspirated like on the production car, but the AMG engineers had managed to increase its output from a little over 200 hp to no less than 375 hp, making it fast even for a thoroughbred sports car from current days.
Sadly, the stock automatic transmission with only three forwards speeds was kept in place because of a lack of homologation papers for the much more preferred five-speed manual.
This didn't stop AMG driver team Schickentanz and Denzel to secure a victory on the legendary Nurburgring Nordschleife in 1980.
Alex handled his first real steering wheel at the age of five (on a field) and started practicing "Scandinavian Flicks" at 14 (on non-public gravel roads). Following his time at the University of Journalism, he landed his first real job at the local franchise of Top Gear magazine a few years before Mircea (Panait). Not long after, Alex entered the New Media realm with the autoevolution.com project. Full profile
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