INDUSTRY 411
HMF RACING ATV WORLD Magazine sits down with HMF
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here is a lot of history to HMF Racing, much you may not have known. According to the paperwork, HMF originated in 1997 in Cleveland, Ohio. However, it technically started in 1947 when its founder, Hans Luenger and his wife, Annelie Luenger fled Germany during WWII. Hans learned to fly in Adolf Hitler’s Youth Corps. He soloed a glider at age 14-1/2 and, at the time, had 1500 hours in motorless aircraft. During WWII, he was a lieutenant in the German air force and flew transport planes for the German army. During an operation, deception forced him to land with 70 other German pilots on a German base held by Americans. All of them were taken prisoner and held for 18 months. At the age of 24, Hans escaped, gathered his belongings with his wife Annelie and hitched onto a boat, west-bound for Canada, where they spent two years learning English and studied for their naturalization tests. Through resiliency and adversity, they made it to the United States in Cleveland, Ohio, where they set up shop. Current owner, and son to Hans and Annelie, Hans was born in the United States. He started his engineering career early, working alongside his father, building, and repairing airplanes at the curious age of five. Sometime in 1967, his father and partners decided to build the first fiberglass sailplane in the U.S., known as Project Beta. Project Beta was a 55-foot self-designed sailplane with a sleek new fuselage it took five years to build and the young Hans worked beside his father changed the aileron drive on a Ka-7-type to an internal drive system while holding the pan as he tirelessly built the fiberglass body. Those days were
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ATV WORLD MAGAZINE • VOL 18 • ISSUE 4
the foundation for everything the young Hans would create moving forward. One of the passions of the younger Hans was racing. He caught the speed bug in his twenties and realized that the performance on his motorcycles and four wheelers had more to give then what was there and this is where his engineering background kicked in. The first exhaust In the 1980s and ‘90s, I worked as a millwright designing and building mills and maintaining mil machinery for PPG (Pittsburgh Plate Glass). Recently after purchasing my home, a company-wide layoff at PPG occurred. Needing to make money quickly, I started customizing motorcycles, building custom parts and got myself into road racing. Some of the performance pieces I was making began to get noticed by racers, increasing the demand for parts. The word quickly spread, making its way to New Jersey where Fast by Ferracci owner Evaldo Ferraci had his shop. Through several contacts, HMF started building the race systems for the 916’s that Fast by Ferraci raced in the AMA SuperBike Circuit. For the first two years, HMF did a private labeling for Ferraci, which proved to be the leg that got the company off the ground. HMF (Hans Motorrad Factory) Engineering was created in 1997 and developed their first exhaust line for the Honda RC-51 and Suzuki GSX-R motorcycles. The demand for these performance exhausts catapulted HMF to create more highperformance aftermarket exhausts for motorcycles. During the “four-wheel revolution,” they started developing exhausts for the Honda 400EX. The aggressive, deep sound of HMF exhausts was absolutely what the off-road demanded.
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