CHRIS HODGETTS: STILL FLAT OUT AFTER ALL THESE YEARS
Chris Hodgetts is not one who can be accused of resting on his laurels. And he’s gathered plenty of them across over four decades in motor racing.
He is a multiple champion in the British Touring Car Championship: twice overall and five times in his class, and he experienced all four of the contest’s classes during the 1980s and with it pushed a wide variety of machinery to its limits.
Hodgetts has also taken part in no fewer than six Le Mans 24 Hour races, peaking with a seventh-place finish overall in 1989 in the screaming rotary-engined works Mazda. And, as we are to find out, he’s done plenty more on and off track even over and above all of this, including racing in Japan, New Zealand and elsewhere.
And Hodgetts, who hits 71 years of age next week, to this day still has a vital hands-on role in UK motorsport and its future, as driver coach to some of its brightest young talents. His pupils include twice W Series champion Jamie Chadwick, 2020 Porsche Carrera Cup GB champion Harry King and new Porsche Junior Adam Smalley. As Hodgetts notes, he remains “flat out”.
But let’s start with his somewhat unlikely beginnings.
Question: Was he really a milkman when he started racing in Clubmans? Paul Lawrence Via Facebook Chris Hodgetts: “One hundred per cent. [My] mother and father, they started a dairy business after World War Two, I grew up on a milk round getting up at 0430hrs helping my parents, yeah 100%.
“And I eventually inherited the dairy business, it was a retail bottle milk, mother and father built the business up and that in effect when I was karting managed to give us a level of being able to go karting at a reasonable level in the UK. But what you must remember, at that time there were no supermarkets or anything like that. When mother and father were retirement age they handed the business over to me, but the milk business selling milk to your doorstep was on the downward slope obviously because people like Tesco’s open and the whole thing just melted away.
“So I handed it over to Birmingham Dairies and that was that, and with the small amount of profit that I made from it I bought myself my first Clubmans car. Yeah, perfectly true.”
MN: Sounds like it turned out to be useful for your racing?
“Well I was a milkman and that was it, wouldn’t say it was useful for racing, but yeah that was theAnd what was it like starting out in Clubmans racing?
