Homemade Mercedes 190E Evo II Has a Twin-Turbo Ford Raptor Engine

I want to make something clear from the start: the Mercedes 190E you see in this Top Gear video is not an Evo II. The 1990 Mercedes-Benz 190E 2.5-16 Evo II is one of the coolest sports sedans in history, a homologated DTM race car for the road that packed a 2.5-liter, Cosworth-tuned, 16-valve four-cylinder engine. It’s a legend. But that legendary status makes it extraordinarily expensive nowadays, so tuner Dom Tucci decided to make a tribute car out of a bone-stock, $500 Mercedes 190E sedan.

Now that it’s almost finished, it’s anything but an ordinary 190E. The car was stripped down to its bare chassis, given extensive custom bodywork to match the Evo II’s, and had its entire interior upgraded. It has the same swoopy fender flares, the same massive rear wing, and similar wheels. If you saw it up close at a car meet, you’d probably be able to spot its differences from a real Evo II. However, if you saw it driving around, you’d think it was the real deal.

Inside, it’s similar but not exact. Its black leather Recaros are similar to the Evo II’s seats, and so are some of the auxiliary gauges. But the actual gauges are all new, it has a completely different shifter, and its Blaupunkt headunit is meant to look old-school but has newfangled tech like Bluetooth connectivity.

But you don’t want to hear about seats and gauges. You want to hear about its engine. Rather than the buzzy, motorsport-bred, Cosworth-tuned engine from the original, this tribute packs a rather blasphemous 3.0-liter, twin-turbocharged V6 from a Ford F-150 Raptor. It naturally required some extensive fabrication to fit the pickup truck engine in there, with custom mounting points and new plumbing for the turbos. According to Tucci, though, the Raptor engine was a fitting choice, as it’s only two degrees away from Cosworth‘s original: It was built by Ford, and Ford has worked with Cosworth a bunch over the years. That’s a stretch, but I see where he’s going with it.

The stock Raptor engine makes 450 horsepower and 510 lb-ft of torque—significantly more than the old Cosworth four-cylinder’s 232 horsepower and 181 lb-ft. In turn, this tribute would blow the doors off a real Evo II in a straight line. It sounds worse, though. Even with the exhaust work that’s been done to it, it just sounds like a generic tuned V6, completely lacking the original’s character.

Tributes like this one are cool, and often necessary, as the original classics they’re based on can be far too expensive for normal folks to buy. The most recent Evo II to sell on Bring a Trailer required $328,000 to take it home.

Got tips? Send ’em to tips@thedrive.com

The post Homemade Mercedes 190E Evo II Has a Twin-Turbo Ford Raptor Engine appeared first on The Drive.