Marv’s Garage: Gemballas are automotive Pit Vipers
Strap on your lederhosen kids, because Uncle Marv is going to float you into the wild world of Uwe Gemballa; we’re serving German tuning, 80s supercars, and murder!
Uwe was a German bloke who liked modifying cars and driving fast. In the early 1980s, he founded a tuning company offering by-order modifications as well as turn-key special models based around some of the latest hotsauce Porsches, BMWs, and Mercedes. Their Avalanche model was a 375hp 930 Turbo with a slant nose and super-fat widebody, with upgraded interior and an astronomical price tag, but punters ate up the wild mods and they soon joined other European tuning luminaries like RUF and Koenig.
Gemballas sported truly advanced tech and OTT luxury: he had video cameras in place of rear-vision mirrors in the 80s; was featured in Pioneer’s advertising during the peak of the car audio era; and offered champagne coolers in his cars. Vanilla Ice even had a Gemballa.
Even if your eyes were painted it’d be hard to miss the fact Uwe styled cars with the subtlety and good taste of a Motley Crue afterparty at Tony Montana’s place. But Uwe’s tuner hot rods were also ballistically fast. His chop-top Mirage model was reportedly good for better than 300 on der autobahn in the mid-80s, though I have never been able to find independent confirmation of that.
By the 90s he was concentrating on turn-key Porsches and Gemballa was maturing. Gone was the spearmint leisure suit styling in favour of a concentration on mega-performance. His 750 Evo models were claimed to breach 350km/h, as the man himself told me when I interviewed him at the Sydney Motor Show in 2004. I never tested that claim but the GT2-based Evo I drove made the 1000hp GT-R Skyline I’d driven feel glacial.
Rumours swirled that Gemballa was tied up in shady business which, if I’m honest, isn’t uncommon in the automotive aftermarket. But in Feb 2010 Uwe disappeared on a business trip to South Africa. His body was found in grizzly circumstances several months later, and while the business continues on I feel the world lost a crazy, big-dreaming horsepower junkie the likes of which we’ll never see again
You can find more from Marv's Garage on Instagram.
