If he is remembered by Australian motorsport fans who were around during the 1970s, it’s because of his unusual name. It was Hans Tiepermann who convinced the Geoghegan brothers to ‘suit up’ at Bathurst, helped put Toby Lee shirts on our backs and got the colours of Grace Bros department stores onto a flotilla of racing cars. This tall, blond German-born entrepreneur helped pioneer on-track brand activation and corporate hospitality as well as co-operative advertising and guided many an aspiring race driver on the pathway to future success – John Leffler, Geoff Brabham, Andrew Miedecke and John Smith, to name a few. However, when Grace Bros left motorsport at the end of 1977, Tiepermann did likewise and completely disappeared from the scene.
Sadly, Hans Tiepermann is no longer with us, but AMC has interviewed over a dozen drivers and managers and spent a year compiling the story on this pioneering motor racing entrepreneur.
Early days
Hans Tiepermann was born in Berlin, Germany in 1939, less than three months before the outbreak of World War II. During the war he was sent to live with his maternal grandmother in Poland. Life was very difficult and as a young boy he witnessed terrible atrocities from the advancing Russian forces. As a teenage boy he learnt to be a tailor. What should have been a four-year course was condensed down to a year by a teacher who was suitably bribed. By the time he was 15 he was able to make a suit from scratch.
Tiepermann’s older half-brother Hans Jürgen Enz, was a keen supporter of the local football team, SC Tasmania 1900 Berlin, and decided that he would make a new life for himself in another ‘Tasmania’ on the other side of the world! Jürgen Enz’s younger half-brother boarded a cargo ship in 1954 and made the single passage journey to the Apple Isle at the age of 15 to work on Tasmania’s hydro-electric scheme. His entrepreneurial flair soon surfaced. He started sourcing fabric and making suits for his co-workers after hours. It soon became his main source of income. After leaving the hydro scheme he worked as a tailor for Hans Jürgen in Hobart for two years before joining Glasser & Parker, the iconic Hobart menswear store that was still trading until it closed its doors in 2015, and soon promoted to floor manager.
Hans was musical, playing in a jazz band. He loved water and he loved fast cars. He bought one of the first Fiat 1500s to arrive in Tasmania and fancied himself on the racetrack. In a 1974 interview in Racing Car News he said the Fiat 1500 was – ‘a genuine 100 mph car when Holdens could reach a genuine 80’. He went on to claim, ‘There were always at least six Fiats and they raced side by side every meeting. Then Beechey arrived at Longford with his FJ and we all had to move over.’
It sounds impressive, but sadly Tiepermann’s yarn doesn’t stand scrutiny today. Beechey and his FJ were at Longford in 1962 but there weren’t any Fiat 1500s. They didn’t arrive on the Tasmanian scene until 1963. Through some detective work with Tasmania enthusiasts Lindsay Ross and Andrew Lamont, Tiepermann’s Fiat was first registered in October 1963 and raced at Symmons Plains on 1 December 1963 and Baskerville on 8 December 1963. The Baskerville photo encapsulates his racing career in one frame. His car 31 is immaculate and is being driven sedately, whereas fellow Fiat punter Barry Miles is cornering his 1500 on its door handles. Not surprisingly there are no record of him racing the Fiat after this Baskerville meeting. Perhaps wisely, Hans figured that his future motor racing endeavours lay on the other side of the fence...
Setting sail for Sydney
Believing that Tasmania was too limiting, he decided to make the move to Sydney in 1963-64, having previously made a number of buying trips there. He found a job as a menswear buyer at McDowells in Sydney. McDowells operated menswear stores in the city and the suburbs of Hornsby, Caringbah and Dee Why and had about 1,200 employees (they were taken over by Waltons in 1972.)
How Tiepermann
