Forty years after winning the 12 Hours of Sebring in a Porsche 962, Hans-Joachim Stuck wants desperately to drive its spiritual successor, the Porsche 963. There’s just one problem. He doesn’t fit.
“I couldn’t fit into the car—I was too tall, so this was out of any consideration,” the 75-year-old German said. Not age. Not reflexes. Not fear. Dimensions.
It’s a detail that tells you everything about the man they call Strietzel. He’s still ready. The cockpit isn’t.
Stuck won Sebring twice overall and took a class win in 1993, all in Porsche machinery. His first overall victory came in 1986, sharing a Coke-liveried 962 with Bob Akin and Jo Gartner. That same year, he also won Le Mans for the first time.
His father had told him as a boy there were a handful of races he simply had to win—Le Mans, Sebring, Monaco, Indianapolis. Two out of four isn’t bad when the entry fee is your life.
And that’s not metaphor. Gartner, Stuck’s co-driver and close friend at Sebring, was killed just weeks later in a crash during the 24 Hours of Le Mans, driving a different team’s 962. Stuck speaks of him with the kind of precision reserved for grief that never fully heals.
“Jo wasn’t only a good friend—he was a very good driver,” Stuck said. “He listened to others. He learned. He obeyed the rules we made, especially for Sebring.”
The Group C era devoured talent. Aluminum chassis, wings that departed at speed, wheels that simply fell off. Stuck survived because he was fast, lucky, and because he chose his machinery carefully.
Porsche, in his telling, was life insurance. Engineer Norbert Singer built cars where safety wasn’t an afterthought bolted on after a fatality—it was baked into the suspension geometry, the structural design, the philosophy.
“Sitting in a Porsche was kind of insurance, and you could really concentrate on the high-speed racing,” Stuck said. “Otherwise, you’re feeling anxious about losing this or that, or that breaks.”
At Le Mans—before chicanes tamed the Mulsanne Straight—Stuck said you could take your hands off the wheel of a properly set-up 962 and it tracked true. Singer had dialed in specific suspension settings for the circuit’s terrifying long straights so the driver could focus on driving instead of surviving.
Stuck processed danger the same way a lot of his contemporaries did: he didn’t. Not until the helmet came off. “When the race is over, you sit and talk to the guys and go, ‘Jesus Christ, I was totally crazy, but it worked.'”
His crashes tended to hit rear-first. Had the geometry been reversed even once, he said plainly, he wouldn’t be here.
What’s striking about Stuck at 75 is what he refuses to become. He’s not the embittered old guard lamenting that modern racing has gone soft. He embraces alternative fuels and electrification where they make sense.
He’s fascinated by the technology in the 963, which gave Porsche its first Sebring win in 17 years last season. He reckons a current GTP driver dropped into a 962 cockpit would be “positively shocked” by what his generation managed with so much less.
His one gripe with modern circuits is reasonable: too many hundred-meter runoff areas that dilute the consequences of mistakes. He points to Monaco as proof that drivers crave proximity to walls, not distance from them. Precision, not forgiveness.
Sebring’s original concrete surface—the same slabs from its airfield days—still punishes cars and spines alike. Stuck calls it a “real” racetrack, the kind that demands bravery and experience in equal measure.
He spent countless hours at Porsche’s Weissach test track shaping the 962 into the dominant prototype it became, then returned to help develop the 911 GT1—a car he describes as a 911 sawed in half behind the seats with a 962 engine stuffed in back. Development work was rarely glamorous, but Stuck treated it as craft, not chore.
At 75, Strietzel has outlived friends, outlived eras, and outlasted the cars that tried to kill him. He just can’t outlast his own height.
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