Category Archives: Tuning

Tuning

The Red Pig Snorts Again—Now With Four-Digit Horsepower

Some legends never die. They just come back louder, angrier, and with turbochargers.

More than fifty years after Mercedes-Benz and the newly born AMG shocked the racing world with a massive V-8 sedan, the infamous “Rote Sau”—the Red Pig—has been reborn. This time, though, it’s not storming Spa-Francorchamps in factory colors. It’s tearing up California backroads with more than 1,000 horsepower and a carbon-fiber suit.

The original Red Pig was a rolling middle finger to conventional race-car thinking. Based on the stately Mercedes-Benz 300 SEL 6.8, it used a thundering 6.8-liter V-8 to haul a luxury sedan to second overall at the Spa 24 Hours in 1971—an audacious debut that helped put AMG on the global performance map. The real car vanished after the race, sold off to Matra and lost to history, but its legend never faded.

Now it has a modern-day heir.

Instead of resurrecting a fragile museum piece, the builders at S-Klub took a far more radical approach: start with a fourth-generation Mercedes-AMG C63 and wrap it in a hand-built carbon-fiber interpretation of the old 300 SEL. It’s a restomod in the most literal sense—vintage looks, contemporary firepower.

And that firepower is absurd.

The C63’s twin-turbo 4.0-liter V-8 already makes about 510 horsepower in stock S-spec. That wasn’t nearly enough. S-Klub bolted on larger turbochargers, revised the downpipes, and reprogrammed the transmission. The result? A staggering 1,014 horsepower—more than double what the original Red Pig ever dreamed of—while shedding roughly 45 kilograms compared with a factory C63.

In other words, this thing doesn’t just honor history. It tries to rewrite it.

The mechanical madness is matched by the visuals. The wide arches, bright red paint, and cartoonishly aggressive stance mirror the 1971 racer, while details like the blacked-out grille, exposed chassis elements, and LED lighting drag the look firmly into 2025. There’s a full roll cage inside, KW V3 coilovers at the corners, and 18-inch VIP Moduler wheels filling out those bulging fenders. Even the AMG One-inspired steering wheel feels like a wink from the future.

Yet somehow, it all works. This Red Pig doesn’t look like a cosplay car. It looks like what AMG might build if it had no lawyers, no accountants, and absolutely no chill.

S-Klub’s Ed claims it’s the best-driving car they’ve ever built, and that’s saying something for a shop that lives and breathes Stuttgart. With factory brakes, much of the original C63 interior intact, and modern electronics keeping things just barely civilized, this is a race car you can drive to the track, obliterate lap times, and cruise home afterward.

The original Red Pig was outrageous because it wasn’t supposed to work. This one is outrageous because it works too well.

It may not be for sale—but if this is what homage looks like in the age of four-digit horsepower, the legend of the Red Pig has never been more alive.

Source: S-Klub

Tuning

Meet the 1,586-HP Yenko/SC Corvette E-Ray

Once upon a time, the Corvette was America’s attainable supercar. Now? With the arrival of the ZR1X and its twin-turbo V-8 hybrid powertrain, Chevy has kicked the door down on hypercar territory—and then Specialty Vehicle Engineering showed up with a sledgehammer.

Meet the Yenko/SC Corvette E-Ray, a car that takes Chevy’s all-wheel-drive hybrid C8 and turns it into something so violently powerful it makes a Bugatti Chiron look like it’s been hitting the gym only on leg day.

SVE’s starting point is the Corvette E-Ray, already the most usable and underrated C8 variant thanks to its front-mounted electric motor and standard AWD. But SVE wasn’t content with “underrated.” They wanted “obscene.” So they gutted and rebuilt the 6.2-liter LT2 V-8 with forged pistons, a forged crank, beefed-up rods, ARP hardware, a custom camshaft, and a new intake system designed to feed what came next.

That would be a pair of water-cooled, ceramic-bearing turbochargers—because, in the world of modern hypercars, forced induction is no longer optional.

Combined with the E-Ray’s electric motor, the result is a staggering 1,586 horsepower. That’s more than a Bugatti Chiron. That’s more than a ZR1X. That’s more than any Corvette in history by a margin so large it feels disrespectful.

The eight-speed dual-clutch transmission has been fortified to survive this madness, and SVE adds a boost-by-gear system so the tires don’t immediately dissolve into smoke. With all-wheel drive helping claw the car forward, this Yenko could very well become the quickest street-legal Corvette ever built. No official numbers have been released, but SVE hints at quarter-mile times in the low-eight-second range, which is drag-strip-terrorist territory.

Visually, the Yenko/SC E-Ray will stand apart thanks to custom forged wheels—20 inches up front, 21 inches out back—plus unique graphics and badging. There’s a bespoke exhaust, color-matched brake calipers, and light interior tweaks, including new floor mats and skid plates. It’s more hot-rod than haute couture, and that’s exactly the point.

And here’s the truly wild part: SVE backs the twin-turbo engine with a three-year, 60,000-kilometer warranty. That’s a bold move when you’re asking a GM-designed small-block to output more than one and a half megawatts of power. After that coverage runs out, though, you’d better keep your savings account well fed—because the LT2 was never supposed to live this kind of life.

In an era when hypercars cost seven figures and arrive with velvet ropes and long waiting lists, the Yenko/SC E-Ray offers a very American alternative: buy a Corvette, give it to a tuner with no fear, and embarrass everything short of a rocket ship. For an automotive journalist with a weakness for outrageous machines, that’s about as good as it gets.

Source: Specialty Vehicle Engineering

Tuning

When a 1971 Mercedes 600 Swallows a 2024 AMG—and Somehow Lives

In the world of restomods, subtlety usually goes to die. But what the Californian tuning house S-Klub LA has pulled off with its latest creation, Final Boss, isn’t just unsubtle—it’s audacious in the way only a moonshot engineering project can be. Take a stately Mercedes-Benz 600 (W100), the rolling throne once favored by dictators and tycoons, and surgically graft it onto the bleeding-edge underpinnings of a Mercedes-AMG S63 E Performance. What you get is a car that looks like it escaped from a fever dream but drives like a modern super-sedan on steroids.

This isn’t your garden-variety “drop in a crate motor and call it a day” restomod. S-Klub LA founder Ed Sarkisyan didn’t just modernize the W100—he effectively reincarnated it. After buying a factory-fresh S63 for north of $200,000 and putting about 6,200 kilometers on it, Sarkisyan and his team tore it down for parts. Meanwhile, a long-forgotten 1971 Mercedes 600 shell, discovered rotting in a Texas warehouse, was painstakingly resurrected. The twist? The old body didn’t have to be forced to accept new bones—the wheelbase of the classic W100 and today’s long-wheelbase S-Class (V223) is eerily close. So the team ditched the seventies chassis entirely and dropped the restored 600 body onto the complete modern S63 platform.

What lies beneath that regal, boxy silhouette is pure 21st-century insanity. The Final Boss packs the S63’s 4.0-liter twin-turbo V-8 paired with an electric motor, good for more than 800 horsepower and a truly obscene 1,424 Nm of torque. That’s hypercar output in something that, at a glance, looks like it should be chauffeuring a Cold War-era head of state. And it’s not just the powertrain that made the jump. The adaptive suspension, massive AMG brakes, and the full electronic nervous system came along for the ride, including the MBUX infotainment suite, massage seats, and a full menu of driver-assistance tech.

Crack open the door and the time warp becomes complete. Where you’d expect polished wood, chrome toggles, and the smell of vintage leather, you instead find a fully digital AMG cockpit, crammed into the relatively narrow greenhouse of a 1970s limousine. It’s as if someone hid a modern S-Class inside a museum piece—and then gave it launch control.

Outside, subtlety was clearly not on the design brief. To match the S63’s wide track, the 600’s bodywork has been aggressively flared. The headlights are a particularly wild bit of nerdy craftsmanship: the original W100 housings were 3D-scanned, digitally re-engineered, and then adapted to swallow the AMG’s modern LED units, complete with functional air intakes. The deep green paint is offset by exposed carbon fiber on the roof, mirrors, and aero trim, giving the old-money silhouette a distinctly new-money edge.

And then there’s the internet, doing what the internet does best. While many enthusiasts are in awe of the sheer engineering effort—calling it “next-level” and “a work of art”—others are clutching their pearls over the styling, especially out back. The massive, JDM-style fixed rear wing and the oversized Mercedes star in the grille have become lightning rods for criticism, turning the Final Boss into a rolling comment-section war.

But that, in a way, is the whole point. The original Mercedes-Benz 600 was never meant to be tasteful—it was meant to be the biggest, baddest luxury car on the planet. S-Klub LA’s Final Boss simply updates that mission for an era of 800-horsepower hybrids and carbon fiber. Love it or hate it, this is what happens when a classic icon meets modern excess head-on—and refuses to blink.

Source: S-KLUB LA via YouTube