In recent years Mercedes-Benz – once the creator of the finest automobiles on earth – decided that engineering brilliance should be measured by the number of multi-colour LEDs that can be fitted to an interior.

Don’t worry though, the once-classy brand has finally progressed from designing their cabins to look like the ‘Love Island’ villa to… well, designing their exteriors to look like the ‘Love Island’ villa.

The latest C-Class and GLC feature a front ‘grille’ with 942 LEDs, because… frankly we don’t care. We’d rather walk. Particularly when the brand used to make cars like this one, the fabulous Mercedes-Benz 190E Evo II.

Built when ‘Mercedes-Benz’ really did mean ‘engineering brilliance’ the 190E was a wonderfully over-engineered sedan designed to last for a million miles – which many did as taxis in Africa. But it also went DTM racing, and that meant 500 units of a performance version were required for homologation.

Mercedes-Benz enlisted the help of AMG and Cosworth, who tuned the naturally-aspirated 2.5 litre inline-4 to 235bhp, fitted a 5-speed dog-leg manual transmission, a limited slip differential, self-levelling suspension, plus the best aero-kit ever applied to a Mercedes-Benz. And there wasn’t a single LED in the grille.

The result dominated the DTM, and created one heck of a road car. It’s the latter we have here today, courtesy of NV Carmocs of Flickr, and this beautifully presented Speed Champions version.

Clever techniques abound in its creation, particularly in the replication of the iconic aero-kit, and there’s more to see of NV’s superb Mercedes-Benz 190E Evo II on Flickr, where there’s not an LED grille in sight.