Hermann Lang

Lore & Background

Born in Cannstatt near Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg, Germany, Hermann Lang had to go to work at age fourteen to help support his family following the death of his father. Young Lang found a job as a motorcycle mechanic, eventually buying his own used bike with which he began amateur racing. He won the first race he entered and before long decided to compete in the sidecar class. At age twenty-two, he won the German sidecar mountain race championship.

Lang's big break came when he landed a job at the Mercedes factory where he became part of their Grand Prix motor racing team. He was made head mechanic for the Mercedes-Benz W25A model to be driven by the Italian star Luigi Fagioli who had left Alfa Romeo to create a powerhouse Mercedes factory team that also included Rudolf Caracciola. Following a very successful season in which Fagioli won both the Italian and Spanish Grand Prix, Hermann Lang was given a chance to drive for the Mercedes team.

He proved to be most capable on high-speed racetracks, capturing his first win in the 1937 Tripoli Grand Prix at the Mellaha Lake course in Libya which was then the fastest racetrack in the world. Lang dominated the event, winning it for three straight years. That year he won his second major race at the AVUS extravaganza. In 1938, Lang won two more races for Mercedes including the prestigious Coppa Ciano at Livorno, Italy.

Nevertheless, in spite of Hermann Lang's skills and racing success and his popularity with racing fans, being a part of the Mercedes Silver Arrows team was not easy. Made up of wealthy and aristocratic drivers who looked down on the uneducated, working-class Lang, he was always treated as an outsider. However, in 1939, he earned their grudging respect when he won five of the eight Grand Prix races he started, including victories at the Belgian Grand Prix, the Pau Grand Prix in France, the Swiss Grand Prix and his third consecutive Tripoli Grand Prix.

In addition to being a quick driver, Lang was also advantaged in that being a former mechanic, he had a lot of mechanical knowledge of cars and was able to give good technical feedback during testing and races to chief designer Rudolf Uhlenhaut, who was able to develop the Mercedes cars to a greater degree, and Lang's natural feel for the machinery meant that he was able to get set-ups on his cars that made them faster than his rivals' cars.

Reader's Guide

Hermann Lang's career spanned motorcycles, Grand Prix, and sports cars. He won the Tripoli Grand Prix three consecutive years (1937, 1938, 1939) and the Coppa Ciano in 1938. He won the Kahlenberg hillclimb in Austria in 1939. After WWII, he returned to racing in 1946 with a victory at Ruhestein. In 1953, he drove in two Formula One races for Maserati, with a best result of fifth at the Swiss Grand Prix. He retired after the 1954 German Grand Prix.