Art.Nr. 30887 Today
, for a change, we’re not focusing on the car itself—the new CARRERA Ford Capri Zakspeed D&W No. 3 in 1:32 scale—but rather on the race car’s main sponsor: D&W.
D&W Auto, Sport + Zubehör Handelsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG was founded in 1971 by Detlef Sokowicz and Werner Bauer as a car accessories shop.
My generation in particular (born in 1970 or later) & still remembers the famous DW catalog from our youth. You’re 18, you’ve finally gotten your driver’s license, and you’ve finally got your first car—usually some cheap clunker that was often hopelessly underpowered. Sure, there were already guys back then who really invested in performance, but the fact was simply this: we had little to no money for well-tuned cars, and on top of that, there was an insurance rating that started somewhere around 225% (you were lucky if you could get a low-percentage policy from Dad, grandpa, or another relative).
And that’s where D W came & into play. If the cars weren’t fast, they at least had to look fast. Low, wide, aggressive, spoilers. The spoiler excesses of the 1980s are legendary; nowadays, in the classic car scene, vehicles are even being restored true to the originals, just as was customary back then. D W& supplied everything back then that made the cars lower and wider. The catalog was as big and thick as a phone book from that era and was passed from hand to hand. Of course, the first few pages featuring scantily clad girls—a standard feature in every catalog that was scrutinized accordingly—were very important. ? And the ones in D&W were staged by outstanding photographers in front of cars with spoilers. The D& W Girls were cult figures and stars at every tuning show.
The ’80s and ’90s were also the years when DW& made the most money. In that sense, it was almost a given that the company would eventually enter motorsports as a sponsor. And what could have been a better fit than the Ford Capri, which was virtually unbeatable back then? A BMW wasn’t yet a first car for a new driver; the used ones were simply too expensive. “Guys” drove Fords, Opels, and VWs; the more daring ones might even go for an Alfa or a Fiat. And D& W had something to offer for everything: lowering kits, spoiler packages from KAMEI, ZENDER, and so on. Rims from Borbet and BBS, sport steering wheels from Momo or Raid. Even seat covers were all the rage back then; sometimes a simple set of trim strips had to do. D& W had it all.
By the late ’90s, the entire tuning business was slowly but steadily declining, partly because the “first car” was becoming increasingly exclusive and manufacturers were taking over more and more of the tuning business themselves (BMW: M GmbH, Audi: S-Line, Mercedes: AMG models, etc.). On top of that, the internet took off. Pilgrimages to the famous D&W “temples” were a thing of the past.&Incidentally, D W’s main store in Bochum was one of the filming locations for the 1991 feature film “Manta, Manta” starring Til Schweiger; there were additional branches in Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, and Bielefeld,&& with about 50 D W centers and over 200 D W retail locations across Germany.
As a result, the company was forced to file for bankruptcy in 2009. D&W survived, and the company still exists today. But the company has not regained the prestige it enjoyed in the 1980s and 1990s.
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