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1938 Grossglockner High Alpines : Hermann Lang, Mercedes-Benz W154 3.0 v12, Daimler-Benz

The meetings followed in 1938 and 1939 indeed brought the large work race stables to the Grossglockner Road, but the atmosphere were strongly impaired by bad weather conditions. Also the numbers of entries remained in a modest scale. Hill climb race champion Hans Stuck on Auto Union, Hermann Lang on Mercedes and Manfred von Brauchitsch participated with their automobiles, Ewald Kluge on DKW, Leonhard Fassl on NSU lined up at the start beside many other participants of the first race from 1935.

The Austrians were steely-eyed during the Glockner race in 1938 as a blue automobile, a perfectly ordinary touring car never seen there before, hummed happily up the Grossglockner race course. The loudspeakers made it known that this vehicle required 21:54.4 minutes for the 12.5 km course and achieved an average of 34.5 km per hour. Utterly without boiling over or adding cooling water. There was a famous man at the wheel: Prof. Ferdinand Porsche, and the automobile – the “KdF car”, Germany's Volkswagen!

Prof. Ferdinand Porsche, who ran a construction office in Stuttgart, constructed this Volkswagen on commission to the German government of the day. Prof. Porsche was then forced during the Second World War to move his factory to Gmünd in Carinthia. The first Porsche models were made there after the war. When the factory again returned to Stuttgart, he also founded the oldest Porsche workshop in Austria, the Porsche in the Alpenstraße in Salzburg. Prof. Porsche also constructed the Auto Union type C racing car, which with about 520 horse power dominated the races in the mid-1930s. This racing car was also used in the three Glockner races.

Grossglockner on August 26, 1938. The field of participants was not very large – motor-sport was simply very expensive! Sepp Hofmann from Salzburg on a private BMW 500 R 51 SS provided one of the two sensations among motorcycle-racing participants in the second Grossglockner race.

The first was that Ewald Kluge (Germany) rode in the worst possible weather the best motorcycle time of 68,46 km per hour and thus became the “German Hill Climb Champion”. And that with only a 250cc DKW racing motorcycle! It should be mentioned that the “German Hill Climb Champion” title was given to the rider achieving the best overall time, independent of the racing class. Kluge rode up the mountain in an overall time (two heats) of 22:05.2 minutes. The second sensation was that the private rider, Sepp Hofmann, with an overall time of 24:38.2 minutes, won in the half-litre class ahead of the DKW works rider, Bungerz.

The course length in 1938 was 12.5 km; one drove twice from the Ferleitentoll gate to the Fuscher Törl. As the winner of the 350cc class, brand colleague Sissi Wünsche (Germany), achieved a time of only 23:12.1 minutes. This was because bad weather hindered fast riding during the event. The newly minted European dirt-track champion, Martin Schneeweiss from Vienna, Austria, disappointed the spectators. He had been taken into the BMW works team that year, but could not get along with the supercharged boxer. He already had “dismounted” in the Grand Prix of Germany in Hohenstein, which also happened to him on the Grossglockner.

Hans Stuck became the “German Hill Climb Champion” in an Auto Union with an overall time of 20:10 minutes (74.67 km per hour) ahead of Hermann Lang and Manfred von Brauchitsch (both in Mercedes Benz). (ph: Daimler, Report: Wikipedia)

^That's^ the text that was included with the photo on faceplant. One of the things that I find amazing is that this is a cobblestone street.