EARNING ITS WINGS
Audi’s Quattro rightly takes the credit for a lot of things. It transformed rallying while also laying the foundations for four-wheel-drive performance cars. Far less celebrated is that it killed Mercedes-Benz’s plans for an assault on the World Rally Championship with its upcoming 190E, though that ultimately led the company down a different racing route. The eventual result was this bonkers-looking Evolution II model, which pushed the Group A category to its limits by 1992.
Development of the Group A homologation 190E 2.3-16, along with its Cosworth-developed M102 16-valve engine, was far enough along for Mercedes to put the road car into production despite abandoning its rallying programme. It subsequently built the minimum 5000 road cars required for homologation in the hopes that a few privateer teams would take it racing.
It was the perfect motorsport candidate: advanced five-link rear suspension (with self-levelling), plus the tough and tunable Cosworth engine, and it was inherently well-balanced: privateers didn’t take long to prove the concept. Even without factory support, the 190E was a serious contender in the
