Davey Hamilton

When folks ask me how I got into racing, I tell them it was never something I had to go and find; my father was an amateur driver--a mechanic who specialized in British and Swedish cars--who raced throughout the Midwest in the 1960s while living in Chicago before moving to the Bay Area late in the decade and racing little sedans and whatever else he built in the SCCA's San Francisco Region. He dragged me to all of those SFR races from the moment I was born, so I never had a chance to live a normal life... Deeply fond memories of him and the chance to get him back to the track in the early 1990s after 10 years away. It was with a $3000 Tiga Formula Ford that I once ran at TR Race Service for its owner Al Nishikawa. Al bought a Swift DB-1 and lost interest in the Tiga, so he stripped it to the frame and stuffed it into a small storage bin. I reassembled the car and we both went through SCCA drivers school, which was a rather amazing father-son experience. This was the last time he drove the old Tiga--last time in a race car as well--from Laguna Seca in 1991. He passed on this day in 1995, and even after 30-plus years of time and distance, it's still lands with a flood of memories.