History The Influence of Tom Cobbs

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The Influence of Tom Cobbs

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It is called Heart... He was in the sport for the sport of it and nothing else... pretty special if you ask me...

 

He was a international tobacco dealer... Or, at the very least, it was the family business... Tom's old man was responsible for bringing American tobacco to both Europe and China.

I haven't been able to confirm any of this with legitimate journalistic integrity, but I've been told that Tom's dad made a ton of money and by the end of WWII, didn't really need to work for a living anymore. So what's a loaded father to do with a son that has an engineering mind, restless energy, and a need for speed? Support him and enjoy the fruits of your labor.

I've also been told that Tom didn't spend money on much of anything unless it helped him go fast. He had a nice home in a middle cl*** neighborhood, took some lavish vacations, but mostly reserved his money for endeavors of speed and power.

A lot of people don't know this, but Tom (or Tom's dad) provided a lot of financial support for So-Cal Speedshop's early efforts as well... Note that none of the So-Cal cars featured any sponsorships at all.

 

I’m with you, absolutely…

But you also have to remember that not every guy with a logo and a catalog was out there trying to squeeze gold from the faithful like some hopped up snake oil prophet. For a lot of them, the branding, the ads, the bolt-on empires, all of it was just a means to an end. A way to bankroll the next experiment... Barney Navarro is the perfect example. Humble as a monk, sharper than a surgeon, and the only reason he stamped his name on anything was so he could afford more R&D. These weren’t all “look at me” pea****s strutting under the neon.

Tom, from everything I’ve pieced together, had the rare luxury of not needing to play that game. He had financing, good financing, the kind that lets a man stay underground, do the work, and leave the world guessing. If he hadn’t? Hell, we might all be scouring swap meets for Cobbs-branded blower manifolds right now.

What’s wild is this. I’ve met, interviewed, or otherwise dug deep into the lives of so many of the heroes from the forties and fifties, and the thing most people don’t realize is how decent so many of them were. Xydias was a razor sharp gentleman with a heart like a golden retriever. Vic, once you got him away from the commerce of things, was kind, generous, steady. Navarro practically glowed with goodness. Mickey Thompson, for all the myth, was an honest, hardworking family man who carried more integrity than most preachers.

It wasn’t until the mid to late fifties that the market got fat enough to feed the big personalities... Barris, Roth, Howard, and the rest of that carnival... Love them or hate them, they were the beginning of the cult of personality in hot rodding.

Before that, it was just men chasing speed, not fame. After that… well, you know the rest.

 

Fran and Vic were buddies... and the main "rival" of Tom Cobbs in early days. In fact, it was Fran that Tom raced in the first organized drag race. Details here: https://www.jalopyjournal.com/?p=2687

Strange little tale for you… Ralph once threw me a lifeline and had the Tom Cobbs roadster hauled out to Penngrove for our Hot Rod Revolution back in 2009. A hell of a gesture, the kind of thing that makes you wonder what karmic debts you accidentally paid off. And as if that wasn’t enough cosmic mischief, the Fran Hernandez roadster rolled in too. But here’s the rub: I had no clue it was the Fran Hernandez roadster. Just another *****in old car in a sea of *****in old cars.

So there we were, completely oblivious, hosting the first two “purpose built” drag cars ever created... And we didn’t even park them together. They were sitting there like two old war generals at opposite ends of the bar, not realizing the other was in the room.

Now that I know, it gnaws at me like a rat in the drywall. A missed opportunity of crazy proportion. But it also drives home the only real truth any of us ever get in this racket: no matter how much you think you know, there’s still a mountain of weird, beautiful, **** left to uncover.

 

My dad always said that the secret to life is realizing this as you get older and older... The moment you convince yourself you’ve got it all figured out, that’s the moment you start mutating into a narcissistic old fart who doesn’t know a ******* thing about anything... just flapping your gums and mistaking noise for wisdom.

That's actually something I think about a lot. And that makes me think about Xydias... I mean, he lived to a pretty ripe old age and the last time I talked to him (I think he was 95 or so), he was still working to figure **** out and adapt to life.

So many people let their intellect rot out long before the ch***is gives up. They coast. They calcify. They turn into relics who stopped learning decades before their heart finally taps out. Not Xydias. He stayed awake. He stayed curious. He kept moving his mental feet even when the rest of him was slowing down.

That kind of fire is rare. And it scares me in all the right ways.

 

I’m not convinced it's under our control.... We’ve got a close family friend that gave as much as anyone to the world of drag racing. Sharp as a tack, innovative as hell, a real force of nature... Broke so many records, he started to sound like a broken record. And then one day, somewhere in his sixties, the lights just started dimming. And once that happens, once the intellect starts slipping, pride kicks in, shame kicks in, and pretty soon you’re stuck in a vicious loop. You stop accepting that you’re wrong, you get humiliated by the gaps, so you double down, and the whole machine spirals into the ditch.

It’s terrifying. Because if a mind like his can go soft around the edges, what chance do I have?

I hope to hell my mind runs as long as my tolerance for the human race, or at least limps along respectably. I’d like to stay curious until the very end, still trying to figure out the mystery even as the clock runs out.

This **** is too dark. I'm out.

 

For a couple of years, we staged the Hot Rod Revolution on a dusty little league field in Penngrove, Ca. A ballpark for children, suddenly overrun by seventy to a hundred hot rods, each one cherry picked... invite only... Lots of historically significant cars would show. It was surreal. Beautiful. Slightly illegal feeling. Perfect.

There were a thousand stories from those shows, each stranger than the last. Tardel and I originally cooked the whole thing up as a harebrained scheme to earn enough scratch to fly to Hawaii the following week. That was the plan. The reality, of course, was that we never made enough money to cover a cab ride to the airport, but we went to Hawaii anyway because we were too stupid or too stubborn to let common sense ruin a good tradition.

One of the first years, cars we never invited started rolling in like we’d opened a free buffet for lost NSRA attendees. Some were right, proper old warriors we let through without hesitation, but most of them were too new, too slick, too plastic. And just when it started feeling like a riot of the mildly confused, Vern’s buddy arrives in full Hell’s Angels colors. We took one look at the situation, handed him security duty, and the problem evaporated.

Those early years were full of bizarre moments like that, the kind of weirdness that only happens when hot rods, California sunshine, and questionable planning collide at high speed.