Today, Mercedes-AMG is a wholly owned performance division of the automaker. Back in the day, however, Mercedes-Benz used to turn to tuning partner AMG for wild, limited-edition machinery. One of its all-time greatest hits is known as The Hammer.

This is the car that put AMG on the map. And now there's potentially another one on the way. No, it's not being built in-house by Mercedes. Instead, German engineering firm HWA is teasing a Hammer restomod. And judging by HWA's past work, the resulting car should be incredible.

HWA is a German company founded in 1998, with the goal of competing in motorsport and building wild street cars. The firm was founded by Hans Werner Aufrecht, from whom the name is derived. He was a development engineer for Daimler-Benz and one of the founders of AMG.

Today, HWA continues to build impressive machinery based on the Mercedes-Benz lineup. Especially past members of its lineup, such as the wicked HWA Evo you see above.

Back in the 80s, AMG took a 300E sedan and turned it into a legend. The goal was an otherwise ordinary-looking sedan with the ability to touch 186 miles per hour. This meant ditching the 3.0-liter under the hood and swapping in a 5.5-liter V8. Still, AMG didn't merely plop an S-Class engine in the nose of an E-Class.

The mill was polished, balanced, given upgraded parts, and then dyno-tested to make sure it was up to the task of massive speed. While 355 horsepower and 388 pound-feet of torque sound tame today, these were mega numbers in 1986.

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