Mercedes-Benz: The AMG Cars
A Journey Through 30 Years of Performance Icons
by Brian Long
“In the days of old, tuning was largely the realm of guys armed with a copy of ‘Cars & Car Conversions’ attempting a full engine rebuild to blueprint standards outside their own homes, calibrating a one-off suspension with a bare minimum of tools, and cutting bits of metal here and there to ‘improve’ and create something unique.”
Superficially, that could be the AMG story but if things there ever were like that, they didn’t stay that way for long. That Mercedes-Benz would ever look—well, learn to look—favorably upon an outside firm “messing” with their expensive, upmarket cars is anything but a foregone conclusion, and the eventual merger of the two firms a proposition you wouldn’t have bet on when AMG first hung up its shingle in 1967.
And here the book proper begins, 1993, the year AMG shared the Frankfurt Auto Show stand with M-B as an official partner. By that time the tuner movement of the 1980s had matured from a niche industry into the mainstream. In fact, M–B had long before started to offer AMG parts in their own catalogs and even gave customers the option to have them installed by the factory.
That is not where this book begins or what it is about. It is mentioned, naturally, because as seasoned an author as Brian Long doesn’t just tell half a story. Nor does he re-tell a story that just last year (2025) had already brought the record up to date. When we reviewed that book, Mercedes-AMG: Race-Bred Performance by Matt DeLorenzo, we already knew enough about this Long book to say that it was on a different tack. And so it is: 1, its focus is on the years after 1992/93; and 2, it is less a business development/engineering history but first and foremost a model “catalog” with enough of the surrounding factors woven in to put the whole thing into context.
Stump your buddies at the bar with this morsel: AMG had a stake in superbike maker MV Agusta (left page)! It lasted only three years so is not exactly common knowledge. And while you’re at the bar, drown your sorrows over the ultra-rare and ultra-fast Mercedes-Benz C63 AMG DR 520 Estate on the other page only ever being available in the UK. Unless you were F1 World Champion Jenson Button you had to know the secret handshake to snag one of the only 20 cars, of which 15 were saloons. And even Button (it is believed) had to pay for his!
So, picking up a word from the subtitle, this new book will ring your bell if you’re already well under way in your AMG journey to want to know about minutia like trim levels and specs and nomenclature (confusing! inconsistent!), pricing, and market-specific features. The latter is a predictable story point in a Long book and once again he has availed himself of the contacts he has built over years of living in Japan to include sales literature from that market; you wouldn’t find this anywhere else. One other thing you won’t find, here or anywhere, is production numbers because automakers no longer share such data publicly. This is of no practical concern (few AMG cars are one-offs or even very limited) but listologists may grumble.
Many pages of many brochures are reproduced, often large enough to remain legible, if you speak the respective language.
A key fact to be aware of is that the book is organized around Calendar Year order because most of the world uses the same Gregorian calendar whereas Model Year is subject to all sorts of arbitrariness such as launches in different markets. There is an Index but it doesn’t list AMG models, nor does the Table of Contents (which would not really be practical) so the one sure path is to find a model in the 4-page “timeline” table in the Appendix (below), ascertain the relevant year/s, and return to the TOC to find what page/s that year’s coverage starts:
This is one of four 1993–2024 Timeline pages. Presented as a chart they make a better point than long-winded text: there exist a LOT of AMG models, and the models overlap.
At almost 500 pages this is quite a massive book (it feels even bigger because it is landscape) so it is amusing to note that Long had to make three runs at reducing the contents; and he laments, “sadly, there just isn’t a market for a 5000–6000 page book . . .” Speaking of laments, in a throwaway remark in the Introduction he tells of “a time when giving up writing has often seemed more likely than penning a new book.” Perish the thought. He has written more than 80.
The “Motorsport Round-Up” sidebar on the right is a recurring feature. We picked this one to pick on the Index: the text above mentions a sponsor called the Mercedes-Benz Bank and it is so listed in the Index, with this one page reference. What isn’t explained is what that bank is and does (it is chartered as a “universal bank” which is something most US readers would not be familiar with), illustrating the point that this is not a business history.
Copyright 2026, Sabu Advani (speedreaders.info).
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