The coincidence is convenient, and irresistible. This weekend, out at Kemper Lakes Country Club in Long Grove, the geezers of golf are competing, and up at Road America in Elkhart Lake, some 500 aging drivers are doing the same in some ancient and memorable automobiles.
“Vintage racing around the world is huge, and the senior golf tour is a good analogy,” says 59-year-old David Hobbs, a Trans-Am series champion in 1983 and the grand marshal of the event known officially as the Merrill Lynch/Brian Redman International Challenge Vintage Weekend Presented by Jaguar.
“Senior golf these days draws about the same crowds (as the PGA Tour), and they’re making almost as much money. With the vintage cars, a huge amount of the crowd is my age. This is what they watched when they came out of college. All kinds of guys come up to me and say, `I remember seeing you when I was 18 (and driving a BMW, or a Porsche, or a Ferrari). Here’s my son who’s 15, and he loves it too.
“Nostalgia is big everywhere. Architecture is going back to the Gothic style. Music. Every city you go into now has two, three oldies stations. Furniture is much more traditional. Racing is the same way. I think people remember it as being an unsullied area then, much more pure than it is now. I don’t know that it was, but I think people feel it was cleaner then, more sporting.
“If racing had a senior circuit like golf, it would be very, very popular. It would be difficult getting someone to provide the machinery (too expensive). But if we could, it would be huge.”
Then and now: Hobbs was 19 years old when he first tooled around a track, and then announced that this was how he wanted to earn his living.
“When I started (in 1959),” he says, “it had the image of a sport that was for gentlemen in England, or for these guys (in the U.S.) who’ve got dirt under their fingers. Now people realize drivers like (CART champion Alex) Zanardi, (Formula One star Michael) Schumacher, (Winston Cup’s Jeff) Gordon and (Dale) Earnhardt make major, major money and are the kind of big heroes you used to find only in baseball.
“I remember (ex-champion) Jimmy Clark made $100,000 one year. I thought that was staggering, so yeah, even though you could get killed, it was worth the reward. Now you’ve got Michael Schumacher. He gets roughly $1 million per race.”
Did Hobbs ever envision it going that way?
“Absolutely not. Not even in my wildest moments. But now I think it’s one of those self-generating things. People say, `Hey, Jeff Gordon’s in town. I’ve read about him. I think I’ll go see him.’ I don’t want to say it’s a cult, but once the publicity machine starts working it can generate a crowd.”
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All the way back: Seven cars were involved in the crash on the 49th lap of the Indianapolis 500, but all eyes were focused on Jim Guthrie’s car. It careened over a broken piece of wing and then rose, lost its ground force and finally smashed into the Turn 1 wall with enough force to suck the breath from every observer. What seemed like hours later, Guthrie was alive and (relatively speaking) not seriously injured.
“To walk away with a broken leg and broken arm and a couple of stitches, it’s amazing. I don’t think I would have been around if it had been a few years back,” Guthrie says now.
He’d spend six weeks in a walking cast and miss the Indy Racing League events in Texas and New Hampshire. But he is whole again, and his return is set for Sunday’s Pep Boys 400K.
“It was a `Days of Thunder’ crash,’ Guthrie says with a smile. “But as a race car driver, you just can’t wait to get back in, get out and win again.”
Quickly noted: CART’s FedEx Championship Series is just past its halfway point, but defending champ Zanardi has made a mockery of the points race. He enters Sunday’s Molson Indy in Toronto coming off three straight wins, and with five on the year, he has 58-point lead over runner-up Greg Moore. . . . The CART record for consecutive wins is four, by Al Unser Jr. in 1990.