Talk:David Hobbs

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[edit] David Hobbs and Legends of Motorsport

While working at Speedvision, which became the current SPEED Channel, David Hobbs did some of the commentary for their charming series entitled Legends of Motorsport. Somewhere approaching 200 episodes must have been made, all based around vintage automobile footage, mostly racing. In general, each episode was a complete publicity film, presumably edited depending upon original length, produced by some motor industry vendor. Some were introduced and elucidated by Hobbs, and others by Alain de Cadenet, whose involvement with the new SPEED channel now seems mostly limited to vintage car coverage at Goodwood and Monterey (oh, and also the Barrett-Jackson auction). Castrol, Girling, Triumph, BRSCC and others produced the original films reshown in this series (often complete with scratches). During the film itself, the original narration was used, several of them done by XXXXX Walker (Murray Walker's father).

The series is attributed to the German automobile firm BMW, implying that they provided most of its backing. Three key episodes documented the History of BMW Motorsport.

Another multi-part set of Legends of Motorsport episodes, entitled "Racing in the Fifties", departed somewhat from the format by having Alain de Cadenet provide narration in addition to introduction and elucidation. Footage for these ten episodes, featuring year-by-year coverage of racing in the 1950's, was likely gleaned from several sources.

Sadly, after Speedvision became SPEED_Channel, only about thirty of the episodes were repackaged (to remove the embedded old Speedvision logo, and also replace the previously very stodgy introductions with something a bit more casual). The new introductions were done exclusively by David Hobbs. Jim Liberatore, then the president of SPEED_Channel, once made it clear to me, via the SPEED TV message boards, that there were no plans to repackage any other episodes or produce any new ones.

In one episode of Legends of Motorsport, Spitfires at Le Mans, we see David Hobbs in 1964. In the old narration David said something like, "And the last member of the team was an up-and-coming newcomer who went on to have a brilliant racing career, eventually becoming a Speedvision commentator. Now who might that be?". But the reference has been toned down a bit in the new version.

This is sort of a work-in-progress. I might add some of this to the current David Hobbs article, or perhaps I'll create the Legends of Motorsport article for you. As far as I'm concerned, anyone else can copy these remarks to do either of those two. --SportWagon 20:35, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

  • I eventually did create the Legends of Motorsport article, heavily based on this "scratchpad".

--SportWagon 23:56, 16 December 2005 (UTC)


David also did commentary along side Ken Squire for some Daytona 500's in the early 80's. Maybe even the Talladega races. Speed Channel used to show the old races (1979-199x) weekly back in the early 2000's. They were originally broadcast on CBS.

[edit] Sister Barbara recently passed away

Apparently David Hobbs did have a sister named Barbara. According to brief announcements made on SPEED channel recently, she died recently. (I.e. shortly before Sept 8, 2007). Not sure how to track down references for more about his family, however.--SportWagon 19:53, 9 September 2007 (UTC)