JABBY CROMBAC (1929-2005)

JABBY CROMBAC

Given his incessant perambulations up and down pit lane, Gerard 'Jabby' Crombac personifies a favourite saying in Formula 1 circles: to stand still is to go backwards. Crombac's forward progress has seen him chalk up more Grands Prix than anyone else, (400 of them as of the 1990 Monaco event). The pipe-smoking Swiss-born Parisian journalist has been observing the world championship series since it was formally organized in 1950.

"One of the attractions of this sport is to meet the sort of people we do. Whether they are mechanics, or engineers, or team managers, or the drivers, they are all adventurers.  They are prepared to make sacrifices in their life to have an exciting life.  Sacrifice, for the drivers, is taking risks. For the others, it's working the way they do, with all the travelling. They haven't got a family life.  That's why we see such a turnover in people, because many of them can only take this life for so long. Still, a few here have done their stint. Bob Dance at Lotus and Allan Challis at Williams have stayed on over the years. Apart from that, they are all fairly new people...at least to me.

"I've kept my enthusiasm because it's never the same here. You see, I'm especially interested in the technical side of it and the evolution is absolutely flabbergasting! So there's always something new, something interesting to look at and write about. The most exciting Grand Prix for me is one in which there are new cars. I am in a dream for the whole weekend.

"I'm still here because I still enjoy it. And I was lucky to start my own magazine, Sport Auto, and make a success of it.  So, you know, this is the one thing I have built in my life, and though I've sold it, and I am semi-retired, I kept Formula 1. It's my life."

Crombac was first introduced to the racing life when he was seven years old and his father, who had a chain of department stores in Paris, took the family on a picnic to a motor sport event. That was just before the outbreak of World War Two and Crombac was also a spectator at the first post-war race in Paris, in September of 1945. That winter he came down with a severe case of 'flu and was bedridden for some time. He asked his father to buy him some magazines and Crombac senior presented him with stacks of Motor Sport and Motor, from which Jabby learned all about racing. From them he also learned English and became something of an automotive anglophile.

A stint as a race mechanic trainee with the driver Raymond Sommer in 1949 soon lost its attraction when Crombac discovered it was not going to lead him "straight into the cockpit of a Grand Prix car." He went to work for his father, ostensibly to learn about the department store business, but in Jabby's mind only to earn enough money to buy a racing car. Meanwhile he fed his hunger for racing by becoming the continental correspondent for Autosport. In it he also read about the expoits of Colin Chapman, who was carving a swathe through English club racing in his self-built Lotus Mark VI. Crombac and a friend went halfs and bought the car from Chapman and raced the first Lotus to be sold abroad.

Crombac became Chapman's "man in France" and was such a pronounced Lotus afficionado (his late basset hound responded to the name of Lotus) that Dennis Jenkinson once joked that one of his eyes was green, the other yellow, then the colours of the team. (DSJ has been writing longer than Crombac, but has not attended as many Grands Prix). Jabby named his son Colin James, after Chapman, and Jimmy Clark, who shared a flat with Crombac in Paris in the latter part of his career. When Crombac bought his second car from Chapman, in 1955, he came to the factory to assemble it. "Colin said the mechanics will help you and this tall bloke with a mustache worked with me. His name was Graham Hill."

In 1962 Crombac and an ex-racing driver friend who owned a bar in Paris founded the magazine Sport Auto, but from the beginning Crombac seldom wrote about the drivers in the sport he loves.

"Because I've been a driver myself, and a bad one. So in my mind there are two kinds of drivers.  There are my gods, and they deserve a bit better writer than me, and the others. I don't care about them too much, because I have been a bad driver myself, and I think, of course, they are two hundred times better than I ever was, but they are still not the top.  And I am very elitist.

"Obviously Jimmy Clark was one of the tops on my list. Before that, when I was at Rheims in 1949 and someone introduced me to Tazio Nuvolari, my hands were shaking.  Of course I was a young enthusiast.  But to me, he was the epitome of all that I had read about. Like Jimmy, I was very close with Mike Hawthorn too, and whenever he came to Paris, we would get together. We were both vintage car enthusiasts, so that linked us together. I don't think I could have the kind of conversation with a driver today the way I could with Mike Hawthorn, discussing the merits of the pre-war Alfa Romeo with the swing axle in the rear, and so forth. 

"I was closer to the drivers when we were the same age. But nowadays we have a different era, a change in the driver's mentality. The drivers are not motor racing fans, they are sportsmen who are trying to make a career, and big money, and succeed, and be on television, and so forth.  And that is something which I don't appreciate so much."

"I think you have to be realistic, of course. I do remember the days when there were no sponsors at all, but I also do remember that at this period, the drivers would change their clothes in the front of the truck, and this is where the debriefing would take place too.  And if you wanted a drink or a sandwich, you had to go and queue at the nearby restaurant.  So, let's face it, the sponsors have brought us a very, very comfortable life.  And financially speaking, you have a lot more butter upon your bread than you did in the early days."

Crombac helps earn his daily crust by contributing to the FISA news bulletins that are issued in the press rooms several times throughout a race weekend. This is the reason for his stalking up and down pit lane incessantly. "There are things the teams won't tell you. If you see they are doing something odd, then you can ask a question and get an answer.  But if you don't prompt the question, I mean, prime them, you'll get: 'Oh, fine today, no problem.'  They don't like any problem to appear in the FISA News.  So you have to be on the lookout all the time.  That's why I go up and down all the time.  I never stop more than two minutes."

Jenks & Jabby (GPP phoo)