Johann Abt would have celebrated his 90th birthday on December 20, 2025. The spirit of the successful racing driver, automotive entrepreneur and tuning pioneer, whose life's work has even been immortalized in the street name at the company headquarters in Kempten since 2015, continues to drive the ABT Group more than 20 years after his death. In his spirit, the almost 130-year-old family business has undergone the greatest transformation in its history over the past decade.
Abt's career
Johann Abt, born on December 20, 1935 in Kempten in the Allgäu region, was already driven by a passion for automotive engineering and motorsport as a boy. At the age of 14, he built his first racing car from the war wreckage of a DKW and finished on the podium at his very first start in 1950. At Auto ABT, which emerged from the horse and cart forge founded by his grandfather Johann Baptist Abt in 1896, he learns the automotive trade and supports his mother Rosina, who continues the family business after the death of his father Josef in the war.
After completing his apprenticeship, Johann Abt completed a traineeship at Borgward in Bremen in 1951 and then continued his training at Audi's predecessor brand DKW in Ingolstadt. It was there that the Allgäu native discovered his great love for four-wheel drive and racing motorcycles. In 1955, at the age of just 19, he became the youngest German world champion in motorcycle off-road racing in the DKW works team, returned to automobile racing in 1959 and in 1962, with his master's certificate in his pocket, returned to Auto ABT in Kempten.
"We want a car just like Johann Abt's." This call from customers becomes all the louder the more he wins with DKW models on the circuit and in hill climbs. Johann Abt turns this into a business model: performance enhancement and vehicle refinement for a growing Auto ABT base. The motto "From the race track to the road" is born and characterizes ABT to this day.
In 1975, Johann Abt hangs up his driver's helmet after more than 300 race wins and numerous titles, including the 1970 European Touring Car Championship, and intensifies Auto ABT's cooperation with the Volkswagen Group. Founded in 1967, ABT Tuning now tunes VW models such as the Golf, Polo, Scirocco and Passat in addition to Audi models such as the Audi 80 and Audi 50. With the first ABT Golf GTI, he achieved another tuning success from Kempten and with the early switch to innovative chip tuning, he laid the foundation for ABT's later pioneering role in intelligent performance upgrades.
Via ABT Motorsport, the next company subsidiary, Johann Abt supplies Audi with its broad all-wheel drive expertise for the brand's first factory motorsport project from the end of the 1970s. In 1991, the double blow on track and road followed: he restructured the in-house racing team, which had been shut down since his retirement from racing, and transferred the international expansion of the tuning business to the newly founded ABT Sportsline GmbH as the world's leading tuner for vehicles from the Volkswagen Group.
The family business grows
His sons Hans-Jürgen and Christian initially manage ABT Sportsline together, but since 2011 Hans-Jürgen Abt has been the sole head of the entire ABT Group. "My father was a great pioneer - in motorsport and in tuning. I am proud that his power and curiosity continue to drive our company and the ABT brand forward," says Hans-Jürgen Abt on his father's 90th birthday. "And the 'Johann-Abt-Straße' street sign at our company headquarters, with which the city of Kempten honored my father in 2015 for his services to our city and the entire region, makes me just as proud and grateful every day."
Hans-Jürgen Abt is the fourth generation to manage the company and has been leading it through what is probably the biggest change since 2015. In addition to ABT Sportsline with a focus on vehicle refinement, high-performance models and motorsport, new subsidiaries such as ABT e-line GmbH, founded in 2018, are being created to accelerate the technological transformation of the ABT Group. At the same time, the management structure is optimized: With Daniel and Marina Abt, the fifth ABT generation is now part of the management circle and secures the future of ABT as a family business. As Chief Communications Officer and Head of Marketing, Daniel Abt is in charge of the brand and communications strategy, while Marina Abt is responsible for public company contacts as Marketing & Communications Manager. Thomas Biermaier, initially responsible for motorsport at ABT since 2002 and later also for sales, has been operationally managing ABT Sportsline GmbH as CEO since 2019.
With a clear model strategy and emotional brand management, ABT has grown worldwide as a high-performance brand since 2015 and has further developed its product world in a forward-looking manner. In addition to classic refinement for Audi, Volkswagen, SEAT, CUPRA, Lamborghini and Škoda, the ABT Performance Cars division offers a new dimension of individualization. It includes exclusive, strictly limited special models and small series that combine state-of-the-art technology, precision manufacturing and motorsport DNA.
Over the past ten years, ABT has also shown how tradition and the future can be combined in motorsport. In the all-electric racing series Formula E and Extreme E, the Allgäu-based company is setting global standards for sustainable racing and pioneering technology development, while ABT remains a permanent fixture in the DTM, the touring car program that has been running since 2000.
"Our company has changed more in the last ten years than ever before," says Hans-Jürgen Abt, "but we have retained what is crucial and will continue to do so for the benefit of our customers all over the world: the spirit of Johann Abt, his exemplary enthusiasm and passion for innovative automotive top performance. Today, this spirit can be found in every vehicle that leaves our company premises on Johann-Abt-Straße."