DEREK BELL The Legend
This column is being lovingly put together on my birthday. It serves as a distraction from ‘celebrating’ being another year older. That said, friends and colleagues seem to be enjoying themselves immensely, informing me that I share the same date in history with great naval disasters and suchlike. One went so far as to tell me that my birthday coincides with the inauguration of Mount Rushmore; something about me being old enough to remember when folk first started chiselling out the four Presidents. Yeah, thanks very much for that.
Celebrating birthdays is great when you’re a child, rather less so when you’re not. I don’t want to be reminded, largely because I am still fit, (hyper)active and doing most of the things I have done most of my life, such as driving racing cars. The thing about age, though, is that sentimentality creeps up on you.
At the end of last month’s thrilling episode, I mentioned that I was waiting for a flight to California ahead of Rennsport Reunion VI at Laguna Seca. I was exhausted long before I boarded the flight but will say, hand on heart, that I wouldn’t have missed this event for anything. Much of that was because of the people I caught up with while there. I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed not being manacled to a to-the-second itinerary. I could let my hair down, and did.
There are certain drivers who I see all the time at this kind of ‘do’, but here were others I hadn’t spoken to since the ’80s when I was racing in IMSA. In some instances, that’s because they had gone off to do something unrelated to motorsport. In others, it was because they had been incarcerated, sometimes more than once. There’s a reason why IMSA was often referred to as the International Marijuana Smugglers’ Association.
It wasn’t just wheelmen, either. I reminisced with three former crew chiefs, did a few laps aboard one of the Löwenbräu-liveried Porsche 962s in which I enjoyed great success in IMSA way back when, and then drove another example in two races with my old mate Kevin Doran overseeing everything. It really was like the good old days. I had a ball, although my wife Misti was a little surprised to arrive at the track only to discover that, contrary to what I had told her previously, I wasn’t participating in a ‘high-speed demo’.
Throughout the festivities, one name was never far from my thoughts: Al Holbert. He would have revelled in celebrating all things Porsche, had he not perished 30 years earlier to the day that Rennsport kicked off.
I have mentioned Al a few times in this column before. He was a five-time IMSA champion, Porsche Motorsport North America principal and also my former boss and team-mate. We won more than 20 races together, including the Le Mans and Daytona 24 Hours spanning two consecutive years. His impact on my life remains incalculable. Alongside Al and the brilliant Holbert Racing team, I savoured high-level success at a time in my life when most of my rivals had long since hung their helmets up. Then he was gone. I will never forget the date: Friday, 30 September 1988. We were at the track in Columbus, Ohio, ahead of a 500-mile IMSA race that weekend, and I was still smarting from Porsche’s withdrawal of its works involvement in sportscar racing in favour of the IndyCar programme which Al was overseeing.
I couldn’t understand the logic of such a switch, and was lamenting that Porsche had in effect orphaned the 962, which was no longer the fastest car out there. The likes of Nissan, Jaguar and so on were all coming on strong, often beating us.
So Al took me aside and showed me a one-eighth scale model of a car he planned to build: a Porsche-engined sports prototype that he intended fielding himself as well as selling cars to privateer teams. He reasoned that it would cost around a tenth of what Porsche quoted for designing and developing a new model.
After this, he was determined to make it home to see his son Todd and watch a football match. Al was an experienced pilot but, shortly after taking off in his Piper, he got into trouble. He managed to steer the aircraft away from a row of houses before crashing fatally.
It wasn’t the first time that a driver I knew well had died. It wasn’t even the 20th. This was something else entirely, though. In my own way, I still feel the loss of a great friend and ally, but nevertheless I enjoyed toasting his memory at Rennsport. We all did.
Al Holbert may have passed on three decades ago, but the legacies of his many successes on both sides of the pit wall remain very much alive.
‘Imsa was OfTEN REfERRED TO as ThE INTERNaTIONaL maRIjuaNa smuGGLERs’ assOcIaTION’