FRANKFURT MOTOR SHOW: 441kW Brabus GT S

When it comes to the biggest car shows on the planet, the smaller car-makers and tuners usually know their place. They leave the big-hitters to do their thing, knowing they won’t get the headlines anyway.

Not Brabus, which could well be the busiest German brand at this week's Frankfurt show.

The northern German tuning powerhouse will not only bring warm-up packs for Jaguar's F-TYPE and Land Rover’s Defender, but will also crank more power out of three Mercedes-AMG models, including the GT S supercar.

Touted by AMG as its first direct rival for the Porsche 911, the standard GT comes with plenty of power and handling, with both the GT and the faster GT S capable of running faster than 300km/h.

Now there’s more — a lot more — after Brabus took AMG's hand-built twin-turbo 4.0-litre V8 and crunched it for extra speed and power.

The GT has 350kW of power and the GT S has 375kW, but Brabus has pushed that out to 441kW, for a neat 600 European horses. It’s also pushed the GT S’s 650Nm of torque up to 750Nm to fix the non-existent flat spots in the AMG’s power delivery.

Instead of sneaking to 304km/h (GT) or 310km/h (GT S), the Brabus version now whistles past both of them to 325km/h, which is just the thing when you’re surrounded by unlimited autobahns, or live in the middle of the Northern Territory in Australia.

“You can never have enough power, especially in a sports car,” says Brabus.

The highly modified GT uses the Brabus-developed PowerXtra B40-600 control module as a plug-and-play add-on to the AMG motor’s electronics, delivering new engine mapping for the fuel-injection and the ignition systems, plus lifting the turbocharger boost pressure.

It gives the Brabus-tuned GT S another 66kW of power at 4800rpm and an extra 100Nm of torque, which doesn’t stop it from delivering the same emissions and fuel-consumption data.

And where the standard GT hits 100km/h in four seconds and the GT S does it in 3.8, the Brabus tune pushes that down to 3.6 seconds.

It also gains a titanium exhaust system, with electronically controlled sound management and four titanium and carbon-fibre tailpipes, slicing 40 per cent off the exhaust weight of the standard car.

Brabus claims it has reduced the front axle’s aerodynamic lift at high speed by tacking on more carbon-fibre components, while there are new air outlets in the front quarter panels and lower sill covers, plus a rear diffuser and spoiler.

It also gets Brabus’s own monoblock forged alloy wheels, tweaks to its suspension, allegedly to cope with the higher speeds, but realistically to justify the higher spend. The GT S gets 20-inch front wheels and 21-inch rears, covered in 275/30 ZR20 and 305/25 ZR21 rubber from Continental, Pirelli or Yokohama.

Covered by a three-year, 100,000km warranty, the car sits 15mm lower than the already-low GT S, while the interior has been heavily customised, too.