This obituary was first published in issue 003 of the speedarticle Post.
Hans Herrmann was supposed to make pastries.
That was the plan. His mother ran two cafés in Stuttgart. He trained as a confectioner. He had the scholarship. He had the apron. He had the whole future mapped out in flour and sugar and espresso cups. Then his father was killed when Hans was eight, and the world fell apart.
By the time the war ended, Stuttgart was rubble. There was no flour. No eggs. No sugar. A confectioner with nothing to confect. So he ran the cafés, helped his mother rebuild, and quietly fell in love with cars. His first was a pre-war BMW bought on the black market. It wasn't competitive enough to show what he could do. So his mother sold a gold bracelet, a gift from his late father, and bought her son a Porsche 356. He won his first circuit race in it. The Nürburgring. 1952.
Within a year he was German Sports Car Champion. Within two, Alfred Neubauer, the legendary racing director at Mercedes-Benz, had signed him to the Silver Arrows factory team. His teammates were Juan Manuel Fangio and Stirling Moss. He was a confectioner from Stuttgart who'd been mixing dough eighteen months earlier.
The paddock called him "Hans im Glück." Lucky Hans. They weren't wrong. But it wasn't just luck. It was something else. A coldness in the arithmetic. An understanding of exactly how much room existed between living and dying, measured in centimeters and fractions of seconds, and a willingness to thread that gap at speed.
The Mille Miglia, 1954. Herrmann and navigator Herbert Linge are hammering a Porsche 550 Spyder through the Italian countryside. They approach a railroad crossing near Chieti. The gates are coming down. The fast train to Rome is bearing down. It's too late to brake. So Herrmann knocks the back of Linge's helmet to tell him to duck and drives the open car under the closing barrier, passing beneath it and in front of the locomotive with nothing to spare. He later had the photo made into a postcard. He captioned it: "You have to be lucky."
They won their class. Finished sixth overall.
Five years later, at the AVUS circuit in Berlin, the brakes on his BRM failed heading into the circuit's single hairpin. The car hit the straw bales, launched, somersaulted, and flung him out onto the asphalt. He got up, dusted himself off, and telephoned his mother to tell her he was fine and not to worry. He figured she'd been watching on TV.
He survived everything. The era killed drivers by the season. Jean Behra, who'd shared a car with Herrmann at Le Mans in 1958, died at AVUS one day before Herrmann's own crash there. Gerhard Mitter, his teammate and neighbor, died before the 1969 German Grand Prix. Herrmann watched men he knew, men he'd shared meals with, men whose families he knew, go out on a Sunday and not come back. He processed this the way drivers of that era did. Quietly. And he kept racing.
The record is staggering. More than eighty victories, overall and class. He won at Sebring. Twice. He won the Targa Florio. He won at Daytona. He was the 1960 Formula Two European Champion. He competed in nineteen Formula One world championship events. He set the fastest lap on his grand prix debut with the Silver Arrows at Reims. He scored a podium at the Swiss Grand Prix alongside Fangio. He was the first driver to complete the unofficial triple crown of endurance racing: Daytona, Sebring, and Le Mans.
But the victory that defined everything came on a wet June day in 1970.
Porsche had been chasing Le Mans for years. In 1969, Herrmann and Gérard Larrousse came within 120 meters of winning it in a Porsche 908, losing to Jacky Ickx's Ford GT40 after a slipstreaming battle over the final laps. The closest finish in Le Mans history at that point.
A year later, Herrmann returned with Richard Attwood in a red-and-white Porsche 917K entered by Porsche Salzburg. Attwood had specifically requested Herrmann as his co-driver. "He was one of the oldest guys there and therefore the most sensible," Attwood said. "He didn't want to die either."
Their car qualified fifteenth. More than a dozen seconds off pole. They didn't care. Herrmann told Attwood to take it easy in the early going. Make the car last. Ferdinand Piëch had given them a stronger engine, but twenty-four hours is twenty-four hours. It rained. Hard. Faster cars broke. The factory long-tail 917Ls suffered in the conditions. Only seven cars were classified at the finish. The 917K with the red and white Austrian livery won by five laps. Porsche's first overall victory at Le Mans. Here is what Herrmann did next: he retired.
He had promised his wife, Magdalena, before the race. If he won, he was done. He'd buried too many friends. He'd survived too many things that should have killed him. "It can't be that I'm so lucky," he said. "And at some point, this phase might end." He was forty-two. He drove the winning car in a parade through Stuttgart, from the Porsche factory to the town hall, and then he walked away from racing forever.
To exit his contract with Porsche Salzburg, run by Louise Piëch, he had to find his own replacement driver. He did. Then he built a successful automotive parts business, because of course he did. The retirement lasted fifty-five years. He never raced again. He kept his promise.
He did, however, stay close to Porsche and Mercedes-Benz, demonstrating historic cars at the Solitude Revival and Goodwood, serving as an ambassador, telling stories with the modesty and dry humor that defined him in the paddock. Evi Butz, who worked as Porsche team director Huschke von Hanstein's secretary and later married Dan Gurney, remembered Herrmann as "a most friendly, low key and fun person to be around."
He was kidnapped once, in the 1990s. Held in a car trunk for hours. He escaped.
Hans im Glück.
He died on January 9, 2026, at ninety-seven. He was the last surviving Formula One podium finisher from the 1950s. He would have turned ninety-eight on February 23rd. He is survived by Magdalena, two sons, and a grandson. One of his sons, Dino, lives and works in Los Angeles.
Here is what should be said about Hans Herrmann, beyond the wins and the records and the miraculous escapes: he understood something that most people in motorsport, then and now, struggle with. He understood when to stop. He understood that the bravest thing a racing driver can do is not thread a 550 Spyder under a railroad gate. It's to park the car and go home to the people who love you. He did both.
The baker who became a racing driver. The racing driver who became a businessman. The man who outran trains and walked away from the greatest race on earth because he'd made a promise to his wife. They called him Lucky Hans. Maybe. Or maybe luck had nothing to do with it.
Photos: Porsche AG
