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Hobbs and Paul Hawkins were busy in a Ford GT40 when the sad news came. (LAT photo) ยป More Photos
Editor’s note: The SPEED Report on Sunday night, on which David Hobbs will be a guest, will also air an extraordinary feature and in-depth look at the Formula 1 tragedy of 40 years ago and the death of racing legend Jim Clark.
I remember that fateful day in April 1968, when I was driving in the BOAC 1000kms at Brands Hatch in a Ford GT40 alongside Paul Hawkins. It was Paul’s turn and I was wandering around the back of the pits at Brands, which were pretty crappy in those days, and I was out looking at the cars as they went through Clearways and up into the woods.
Somebody came up to me and said, “Did you hear that Jimmy Clark has been killed?”, and I said, “You’ve got to be joking”. I couldn’t take it in at all, because to me Jimmy Clark was not the sort of guy who got killed. Within minutes it was sweeping through the paddock that Jimmy had been killed at Hockenheim. Originally he was on the entry list for the BOAC 1000kms to drive a Ford F3L, but Colin Chapman decided the bigger priority was the F2 race at Hockenheim, and of course in the end it got him.
It was a defining moment in my life because Jimmy Clark had been a huge hero in my life, as had Stirling Moss. I was pretty shattered when Stirling had his crash at Goodwood in ’62, as I was there. Then for Jimmy to get killed…. we were all very vulnerable in those days, people did get killed a lot, and every time I left home I would look around the room and think, “I may not see this again,” When I look back on it, it must have been absolutely diabolical for my wife at the time because you were really playing with death the whole time because the cars were so fragile and the tracks were so unsafe.
Even so, people like Jimmy Clark did not get killed, and it completely changed my attitude to the sport. I didn’t stop, of course, but it certainly made me feel much more vulnerable and much more conscious of my own mortality from that day on. It was a big blow for me.
I’d been watching Jimmy right from the start of his career because he raced a Lotus Elite like I did. He went to the South African Springbok series and in a Formula 1 car he beat Stirling Moss, which really got my attention because Stirling up until then had been my hero, but Jimmy Clark was coming on fast.
Just after that, we all went off to America. I’d been invited to drive in the first Daytona enduro (now the Rolex 24), which in its very first event was a three-hour. I went with a guy called Peter Berry who had two Jaguars, an XKE and a 3.8-liter sedan, which I was going to drive for him in Britain.
We were invited to do this three-hour, and Colin Chapman rings me up and asked
There was no way to get to Florida in those days other than to drive from New York, and there was no Interstate 95 either, it was all surface streets. We got stopped for speeding about three times, hands on the roof and all that stuff in the southern states! I had a good old time with Jimmy, while Peter Berry was organizing the dispatch of our cars from New York.
I shared a room with Jimmy at the Carousel Motel up near Ormond Beach, and I remember one day we were looking out the window and some bloke drove down the beach and straight into the sea! The thing got stuck and his car gradually disappeared under the waves, which Jimmy thought was hysterically funny. He also commented on the size of my belly, which I thought was a bit unkind! In those days I was built like a rail, but obviously Jimmy didn’t seem to think so….
The three-hour race came and I dropped out fairly early on with a fuel pump failure, but Jimmy was leading the class in my Elite by absolutely miles. Unfortunately when he came in for what would have been his one and only fuel stop in this three-hour race, the car refused to start, so neither of us finished.
Over the next few years our paths crossed fairly frequently. His girlfriend Sally Stokes was a big friend of all the guys who made up the Midland Racing Partnership, with whom I drove the following year (1963) in the Formula Junior British championship. I ran into Jimmy a lot because many of the Formula Junior races were with Formula 1 events. On one occasion we even drove across to Reims together.
Of course he still raced Formula 2, saloon cars, sportscars and so on, and the finest moment in the career of David Hobbs was at the Oulton Park TT in 1965 when I was driving a Lola T70, which was a fantastic monocoque sports car. Colin Chapman had built this Lotus 30 that he thought was going to be a world-beater but it was actually a flexible flyer, it didn’t handle worth a light.
My greatest moment was swooping past Jimmy Clark into a corner called Knickerbrook, and I can still to this day imagine the commentator saying, “and David Hobbs is sweeping past Jimmy Clark!” I should have won the race but there was a cock-up in the scoring and they scored us a lap less than we’d actually done. When they found out they said “oh well it’s too late now, we’ve given the money to Denny Hulme!” Big disappointment for me, but it was made up for somewhat by overtaking Jimmy.
David Hobbs was talking to Sean Kelly
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