A rather sad start to this year as Mr John Dabbs, or more familiarly ‘Dabbo’ – the man who fettled my cars from the mid-’80s on – crossed the finishing line peacefully.

He’d been on a reduced workload for a while, resulting in much uncalled-for mirth from the rest of the team who maintained he’d been on a reduced workload since the late ’70s – all of which Mr Dabbs dealt with imperturbably. Fifty-odd years of workshop quippery had made him the Mr Miyagi of repartee.

He had still been keeping a watchful eye on the Frazer Nash Le Mans replica, a particular favourite of his since he had started his career as an apprentice with AFN. His other favourite was our 1943 Willys Jeep, which was commandeered by him on an annual basis for the re-invasion of Normandy in June each year.

God knows what the French made of this maurading band, made up of Ten Tenths and Dorset Racing personnel. It’s lucky none of the squad had access to heavier metal. Mr Dabbs had done National Service with the 1st King’s Dragoon Guards as a tank driver on Centurions. The pinnacle of his military career was receiving a £2 fine for reversing a Diamond T over the RSM’s Austin Seven. The RSM’s wife was in the Austin’s passenger seat at the time. There is still some doubt whether this made the fine greater or lesser…

Later John worked at the Fighting Vehicles Research and Development Establishment at Chobham, testing Chieftain tanks and other military hardware. He is credited with driving a Saracen over antique furniture on display outside a shop in Sussex when avoiding an oncoming overtaker, and on another occasion tapping the roof of an A35 with a tank’s gun when he had to stop suddenly.

He was also asked to severely test the integrity of a military box trailer for a week on the Bagshot cross-country course behind a Bedford RL. After a week, some representatives of English Electric came down, partly to see how things were going with their trailer, but also on a quest to find some missing sections of a Blue Water missile that had gone AWOL. They found the missile parts reduced to fragments within the undamaged trailer. Both were whisked away, never to be seen again…

With a career that spanned the Army, AFN, and a spell with the Tyrrell Formula 1 team, this mix of military muscle and modern F1 technology made Mr D exquisitely well qualified to look after my rather odd collection of machinery.

When the 1901 Panhard had a chronic misfire on the Brighton Run one year, the fault was traced by John to a broken collet on one of the atmospheric inlet valves. Handily, there was a bus stop nearby and the bus sign duly sacrificed raw material for a new collet. I’m really sorry if this disrupted passenger arrangements to Croydon, but it did mean we got to Brighton.

Then in Mexico on the Carrera Panamericana, when the C-type broke a radius arm, Dabbo cut the handle off an adjacent wheelbarrow to fix it. When asked if anybody would mind he replied, ‘They won’t notice – they’re all one-armed bandits out here…’

But equally, when required, he could be relied on to check a 200-and-something mile-an-hour racing car thoroughly, and not let any of us out in it until he was sure it was safe. He certainly knew a bit about putting wild racing cars together, having been part of

the team that created Dizzy Addicott’s Lotus-Buick, which is what people did before they discovered LSD.
And as the owner of a number of Tyrrell F1 cars I can attest to the fact that the only man better than a man who knows the cars, is a man who knows the cars and still has friends at the works…

He was invaluable to Ten Tenths for working with ‘Those Bloody Film People’. His wife Brenda was a costume supervisor in the film industry, and John was an experienced extra. In one film he can be seen as a Redcoat shooting a smuggler on a Dorset beach. Due to a slight lack of continuity and John’s enthusiasm to find work linked to a catering truck, the shot smuggler is also clearly recognisable as one J Dabbs, esq. It was not a sequence ever entered for a Bafta.

And he could be an excellent team manager when required, whether encouraging a novice daughter in her first race or calming down a superstar hotshot, unused to a car without a rev limiter.
He was a sportsman who would bend over backwards to help a fellow competitor, when camaraderie took precedence over rivalry. He taught us all a lot. About attention to detail, sympathetic engineering and, of course, how to be first in the queue for the film set catering truck.