What’s His Line? Hobbs Hides It Well

The first impression you get about David Hobbs, the race driver, is that his story would make a nice part for Rex Harrison. Basil Rathbone, even.

There’s a little bit of Professor ‘iggins about David, a dash of Sherlock Holmes. There’s a faint hint of disdain, a generous overlay of impatience, irascibility and a leavening of the debonair. In short, veddy British, old boy. It’s not hard to picture him in a bowler hat and carrying a brolly, on his way to Whitehall to see about shoring up the empire for another day.

There’s cynicism, realism, and an absolute refusal to be surprised by anything that ever happens--all the things that made England great.

If you didn’t know what he did for a living you might take him to be Inspector Hobbs of Scotland Yard, or even Hobbs of British Intelligence. He looks too urbane to be what he is--an automobile racer, one of the best.

Hobbs is a Brit by birth and training, but Dad, Howard Hobbs, was an Aussie inventor who came up with one of the first automatic transmission patents and migrated to England in the 1930s to market it.

Son, David, much preferred speeding cars to modifying them and, as soon as he could, was tooling Mum’s Morris Oxford runabout in local races near his home-town of Leamington, not necessarily with Mum’s permission.

It was a heyday of British racing, with Stirling Moss, Jimmy Clark and Jackie Stewart burning up Europe’s road courses. Young David Hobbs couldn’t wait to join them. He “borrowed” Dad’s Jaguar, an XK-140 in mint condition, to move up in class. When last seen, the Jag was upside down in a turn. Young David wasn’t hurt, but the car was.

“Let’s just say we were not able to return it to its pristine condition again,” Hobbs says now. “Let’s just say it was complicated scrap.”

His father was intrigued. He didn’t think it was possible to turn a Jaguar upside down. Young Hobbs knew better. “You can if you concentrate,” he reported.

Far from discouraging young Master Hobbs, the crash increased the appeal of racing. “Look at it this way,” he said. “The way I drove, it was hardly boring.”

Hobbs was brought up during the Blitz and, even though his home was not far from Coventry, which was leveled by German bombers, he doesn’t remember Leamington being bombed much. “We hid under the kitchen table when we heard the Jerries come over,” he said, “but my recollection is, only the odd jettisoned bomb ever fell nearby.”

After he had returned Dad’s Jag, in a bag, Hobbs migrated to a Lotus Elite and club racing on a grand scale. When he won 14 of 18 starts, sponsors began to notice.

Hobbs hit the international scene with the reputation of a guy who would drive anything that moved under its own power, from a Dixie stock car to a London beer lorry.

He drove McLarens in Tasmania, Lolas at Watkins Glen. He had a certain elegance of driving style that prompted Roger Penske to team him with the late Mark Donohue in a Ferrari in the Daytona 24-hour race. If you had the car, Hobbs had the foot. Have flameproof coverall, will travel.

He even braved Indy in the days when the international drivers were phasing out. In his first start in 1971, he qualified a Penske product 16th at 169.571 m.p.h. and was running 12th when his engine quit on the main straight.

“Rick Muther was coming up behind and had place to go,” Hobbs recalled. “He decided his best choice was to go over or through me.”

The cars were totalled, but the drivers escaped.

“Foyt was coming down the main straight like a bullet,” Hobbs said, “and I started to climb the fence to get out of there and I could just see Foyt thinking, ‘What’s that crazy Limey doing climbing the walls? Has he gone mad?’ ”

As usual, the crash did not disturb the unflappable Brit, and Hobbs came back for more. In 1974, he started ninth and finished fifth.

As an athlete who has driven in enduros in South Africa, sprints in south England, stocks south of the Mason-Dixon line, and in sports car races all over, Hobbs finds it tiresome when he notices peoples’ eyes glazing over while he talks about Le Mans or the Nurburgring, only to suddenly pop open when he mentions his rides at Indianapolis.

“ ‘Oh, you’re a real driver! You drove at Indy!’ they say. ‘Right!’ I say. ‘Bloody nothing to it compared to a trick in the rain at night in the south of France.’ ”

This weekend at Riverside, D. Hobbs, Esq., will climb into something called the Bayside Disposal-Bridgestone Tires Porsche 962. As Hobbs pointed out, this is probably the first car to be associated with a rubbish business before a race. The event is the Los Angeles Times/Nissan Grand Prix of Endurance, a 600-kilometer test of rubber, steel and nerves. If the rubber and steel make it, Hobbs will take care of the rest.

Hobbs explained his link-up with a trash disposal sponsor by opining that a man gets a ride anywhere he can in these days of highly competitive and highly expensive motor racing.

After all, he’s always done that. In the old days, he did it by sneaking into the garage and sneaking the family sedan out, liberating it from its humdrum existence.