Since the initial tie up with Mercedes-Benz in 1993, AMG has had five different managing directors, all of whom worked closely with founder, Hans-Werner Aufrecht’s partner, Domingos Piedade.

The latest is Volker Mornhinweg, who took over as Chairman of the Board of Management at Mercedes-AMG GmbH in September 2005. Now that Domingos has taken up a post with Maybach/SLR, AMG is being solely run by a Mercedes-Benz man for the first time ever.

An engineer by trade and a passionate car guy, Volker has seen action in more departments of Mercedes-Benz than any of his predecessors. "I am really grateful to have had the chance to work in so many divisions of the company," he told us. "This has given me the opportunity to become familiar with all aspects of planning, development and production. I even worked with the department that checks the maturity of cars before they are launched, and I have seen 10 new models launched during my time with the company."

"Running AMG is really interesting for me because it is like a mini-Mercedes-Benz with spice added," Volker told us. AMG is a microcosm of the parent company, and this fact gives me the opportunity to bring all my past skills to bear and learn a few more as well working with a really passionate and enthusiastic Team."

"If you run Mercedes-Benz, the sheer size of the company makes it difficult if not impossible to oversee every aspect of the firm and get to the real 'hot spots.' But the relatively small size of AMG makes it easier to oversee every aspect," he explained. "You can also decide and implement things much faster. In today's fast-moving business environment, that is a huge asset."

Over the few short years that AMG has been part of Mercedes-Benz, the nature of the cars has been slowly changing. In the late '90s, Mercedes decided to grow the company and the brand, and embarked on a strategy to develop an AMG version of every Mercedes model.

This has paid off handsomely and now that Mercedes-AMG is successful and profitable, selling more than 20,000 cars a year world-wide, it is time to turn back the clock with a new division that makes more bespoke cars for the kind of wealthy individuals who used to flock to the original AMG.

"At the end of 2005, we decided that it was time to implement a new strategy to build on the success of the mainstream AMG product. In recent years, we still ran an informal department to produce a few bespoke cars for individual clients. However, we felt the time was right to formalize this arrangement, expand and offer it to the wider audience who had been clamoring for more bespoke products in recent years."

"The basic AMG values are a fine combination of high performance and luxury," Volker explained. "But we and our customers agree that there is room for even more highly focused limited-volume cars. And so we created the AMG Performance Studio to provide the components for customers to make their cars more individual, and with a more racetrack-oriented character.