1,000 Greatest Drivers: Hans-Joachim Stuck
Because I got kind of stuck deciding who to profile today...
After completing the series of Daytona 500 winners (which I intended to finish by February 18) I wasn’t sure exactly who to cover next. My original plan was to cover a string of Stock Car Brasil champions from February 19-21, 12-time champion Ingo Hoffmann and 3-time champions Chico and Daniel Serra. Since I was a little behind my intended schedule and I do probably want to do the Serras together, I initially decided I wanted to do Hoffmann today but I was unable to find nearly enough information about his Stock Car Brasil career other than the years he won his championships and I don’t know nearly enough about him to write a narrative although I know enough that I need to include him on this list. There doesn’t seem to be much written about Hoffmann’s stock car career even in Portuguese from what I can tell. Tiago Mendonça did release a very obscure book about him and I may eventually try to procure that (the R$ 39,90 seem to convert to about $7 US), but you need a CPF number to buy anything in Brazil, so I’m going to wait a while and pivot and avoid talking about this scene until I can do more research. I did find the author on LinkedIn, so maybe I’ll contact him there someday and ask him if he can be some more background information to place these drivers’ careers into better context.
So then I looked around to see if any major drivers were born or died on February 21 and the answer is not really. The highest-profile drivers who were born on this date are Peter Gethin, John Harvey, Jim Reed, and Kevin Swindell. Gethin and Reed will likely make it and the other two perhaps have a case, but none are locks. The one prominent driver who died on this date was Ferenc Szisz, the first French GP winner, but he didn’t do a whole lot else and I might not list him; he also died of natural causes and I don’t really intend to cover drivers on the anniversary of their deaths unless they died on that date. So I’ve decided to start playing catchup with some of the drivers I missed earlier in the year as my mom went in the hospital and I was working on finishing the top 200 list. I was trying to finish the top 200 by December 31 so I could restart the daily posts on January 1. The driver I was going to cover that day was Stuck, and then I realized it would be funny to cover him when I got stuck, so there you have it.
