AMG announces 'most extreme Black Series ever'

Mercedes claims to have gone all-in on its new GT3 homologation car...

By PH Staff / Tuesday, 24 March 2026 / Loading comments

In case the Mercedes-AMG GT didn’t have enough variants for you to get your head around, the manufacturer has confirmed this week that two more are inbound. One, admittedly, you do not need to dwell on unless you’re a patron of AMG’s Customer Racing Programme, because that’s what the new GT3 (a replacement for the old GT3) is being developed for. The other, you will want to know about, given Affalterbach is not pulling its punches when describing the next Mercedes-AMG GT Black Series.

Of course, any Black Series variant is big news, based on an extensive track record of exceptional (and exceptionally rare) performance cars - so when AMG’s chairman says, ‘we are developing the most extreme Black Series ever’, it’s worth taking note. Especially when, thanks to an earlier developmental car you might remember from last year - the Concept AMG GT Track Sport, which forms the basis of both newcomers - we already know that an updated version of the flat-plane-crank V8 is doing all the heavy lifting.

This is good news for all the usual reasons, including the scale of the likely output, which will surely exceed the 730hp extracted from the V8 in the previous GT Black Series. Indeed, to adequately sit atop the current lineup, the new range topper will need to outgun the 816hp available to the hybridised GT 63 S E Performance - a notion that suddenly makes a figure north of 900hp seem feasible, if ‘extreme’ really is a guiding principle for its maker.

Who knows. For now, beyond ‘an unambiguous commitment to maximum performance’, Mercedes-AMG isn’t sharing any additional technical information - and new pictures of the aforementioned Track Sport (which has been testing extensively) simply reveal what you’d expect from a GT3 mule - i.e. a very serious attempt to improve on the GT’s aero package, and perhaps even rival the Porsche 911 GT3 RS for rear wing dominance.

Interestingly, the decision to develop a successor to the GT3 has apparently led to the creation of Affalterbach Racing GmbH – a wholly-owned subsidiary of Mercedes-AMG, yet somehow distinct from its Motorsport enterprise (though the latter is still jointly responsible for the development of the race car). At any rate, this is the version due to begin testing at the Nürburgring Nordschleife, and is presumably the model we will see first.

That said, if the bumf is to be believed, devotees will now be able to tell the difference when it comes to test mule mileage: red accents on the camouflage will in future represent the Mercedes-AMG GT3, while yellow-green will be used to indicate the Black Series, as shown in the promo vid. Which, if nothing else, should make it easier for anyone holding a stopwatch on the Nordschleife, keen to find out if the production car lap record is again being targeted. Or at least, a position adjacent to the all-conquering Mercedes-AMG One…