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Former racing driver David Wishart Hobbs was among the 1969 F.I.A. list of graded drivers, an elite group of 27 drivers, who by their achievements were rated the best in the world. David Hobbs’s natural speed and engaging personality eventually took him around the world, racing in every major championship for the sport’s top teams in the era’s most iconic race cars: Formula 1 for McLaren, Honda, and BRM; sports cars in the Ford GT40 and Mirage, the Ferrari 512M, Porsche 917s and 956/962s. He raced IMSA Camel GT for BMW, finished fifth in the Indy 500 for McLaren, won championships in Formula 5000 and Trans Am, and even led the Daytona 500 in a NASCAR stocker. He is most closely associated with Le Mans, where he raced 20 times and finished third on two occasions. Hobbs was inducted into the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America in 2009. David Hobbs has spent the last half-century as one of the sport’s most popular figures on both sides of the Atlantic. In addition to the driving skills that propelled him to success in an astonishing array of machinery, out of the car David is upbeat, personable and often hilarious. Though he won more than his fair share, David’s self-deprecating stories about the times he “coulda, woulda, shoulda” are what make him a popular speaker for a variety of audiences. His commentary style, mixing fragments of the good ol’ boys (“she done blowed up”) with British slang (“mind the klag, lad”) and a host of hilarious, if politically incorrect, dialects, have molded the racing vocabulary of his legions of fans in America. His ability to address the human side of the sport, the physical and mental challenges, as well as the funny, frustrating, and sometimes tragic elements of racing life have made him a staple in American television since his first broadcast with CBS in the early 1970s. The witty Brit currently can be seen as a commentator on FOXSports’ Speed Channel. Read more…