Colin Crabbe saw the potential in scouring the world for classic cars, however wrecked they might be, before any other enthusiast or entrepreneur. In the 1970s and 1980s he travelled extensively to South America and to Cuba, where he unearthed two D-Type Jaguars, 29 other cars and quantities of cigars, all of which were sold on at a profit. Such acquisitions continued until he was almost killed during a race.
Crabbe crashed his Talbot-Lago at Oulton Park in Cheshire in 1988 when an English Racing Automobiles driver lost control and collided with him. Paramedics took 45 minutes to remove him from the wreckage, not least because he was 6ft 6in. His rib cage and right hip were fractured and he suffered the loss of the sciatic nerve in his right foot. Crabbe spent six weeks in an induced coma and was in hospital for almost six months. “It finished my own racing but made for one hell of a write-up in The Lancet,” he quipped.
A concomitant career involved his ownership and management of the Colin Crabbe Racing team, known also as Antique Automobiles. It entered a single car in Formula 1 races in 1969 and 1970 and employed drivers such as Vic Elford and Ronnie Peterson, the “superswede” who was to be a Grand Prix winner ten times throughout his career. Crabbe turned down the colourful James Hunt on the basis of his cavalier reputation behind the wheel. The team used a variety of cars including the Cooper T86, McLaren M7B and March 701.
Crabbe’s involvement in F1, an expensive one given he was still in his twenties and had no significant sponsors, lasted for two years. A stubborn man, he was never constrained by convention. A short service commission in the Scots Guards, which he took up after leaving school to please his father, came to an end when his superiors objected to the number of cars he was keeping and, in particular, a red Volvo. A model in the same colour was owned by his commanding officer, who did not think much of Crabbe being saluted by mistake.
Thereafter, Crabbe specialised, as he put it, in “exporting cars from funny places” as a privateer. In some of these countries, such as India, it was illegal to do so. “A hobby became a business — a rather successful business,” he said. Along the way there were some scrapes, not least in the High Court, where he saw off an attempt to sue him by the hitherto sole importer of Cuban cigars, and in France. “We were playing silly arses with starter pistols and police sirens and then heard the approach of real police sirens.”
He exported 120 cars from South America. “My father went to Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, to scrap heaps through contacts, and found incredible Alfas and Maseratis,” said his son, Alastair. “They were in a shocking state but he managed to make a healthy mark-up on them and was the first person to do so. But it was not until the mid-1980s that prices began to skyrocket.” Crabbe found the Cubans friendly, although a plan to market “Crabbe Rum” did not come off and he was disconcerted by the six machinegun-toting bodyguards Ramón Castro, brother of Fidel, the Cuban leader, had by his side.
The first major racing car Crabbe discovered was a 1956 Maserati 300S which Juan Manuel Fangio raced to victory in the Portuguese Grand Prix in 1957. Another discovery was a Grand Prix Mercedes on the border of East Germany and Poland. “Two weeks later,” Crabbe said, “I was at Checkpoint Charlie carrying a briefcase with $10,000 in it.” The car he located was a 1930s Mercedes-Benz W125 that he restored and raced at Silverstone, beating the vintage club circuit record by six seconds. It was eventually bought by Bernie Ecclestone, the F1 supremo, whom he liked.
An Alfa Romeo 8C Touring Coupé designed for the 1938 24-hour race at Le Mans, which cost him £5,000, proved a less successful purchase. Told by its owner that it had been fully restored, he drove it towards the local autostrada: “The engine died terminally on arrival at the first toll booth, so that was the end of the trip, and a month later we returned to tow it back to England with a Transit van.”
Crabbe also founded, in 1969, the Complete Automobilist, a firm supplying rare and exotic car parts, which survived beyond his crash until he sold it on to a competitor. He acted as head of the car department at Christie’s, the auctioneer, from 1989 until 1992. Yet as with the three years he spent in the army, Crabbe was not cut out to work under the stentorian outlook of authority.
His career as a driver came about on account of a legacy from his American godmother. In his first outing, in a Maserati 250-F at Goodwood in 1964, he pulled in when leading after nine laps, not appreciating that it was a ten-lap race. He waved to the crowd, thinking he had won, only to finish last. “Then I had the mother and father of accidents at Brands Hatch, crashing out. I was fine, although slightly singed at the edges.” That was in 1968 and worse was to follow in 1988. The upshot was that his mobility was considerably impaired in the last ten years of his life.
Colin Brodie Crabbe was the son of Archie Crabbe, who served in the Scots Guards in the Second World War and who purchased a shooting estate on Deeside in Aberdeenshire, and Yvette (née McKenna) who was French Canadian. She had been accompanied by two chaperones on her grand tour (which served as a form of educational finishing school) and been presented with a tiny gold ring by Howard Carter, the Egyptologist, which was thought to have been quietly removed from the tomb of Tutankhamun. It was said of Archie’s father, John (the family, then named Crabbie, was renowned for its production of ginger wine and whisky) that he went to fight in the Boer War as a Crabbie, lost an eye and returned a Crabbe — not least to gain acceptance at the New Club in Edinburgh, which did not permit members who were in trade.
Governesses initially were put in charge of Colin’s education. “One was a particularly nasty woman called Miss Cassels whom I kicked, only to be thrashed later by my father,” he wrote in his autobiography Thrill of the Chase. “Another was so vile that I packed a bag and ran away, getting as far as the home farm, all of three quarters of a mile, but it was enough for her to be sacked and no thrashing for me this time.”
Given his mother was Catholic, he was sent in due course to board at Ampleforth College in North Yorkshire, where he struggled to pass exams but excelled at shot-putting, and became fascinated by archaeology and — when his father appeared in an ex-Ecurie Ecosse Jaguar D-Type which gained him considerable kudos with his peers — classic cars. When he left, his housemaster, Father Walter, said, “Goodbye Colin. Don’t forget to take your Austin.” He did not, however, know that Crabbe also kept a Talbot-Lago close by.
Although Crabbe claimed to have gone on to the University of Edinburgh, he spent just a few months in the city at a crammer retaking his A-levels. He left the Talbot in the Stockbridge area of the city, only for the police to find that the back seat was being used by prostitutes as “a knocking shop”. Crabbe then went into the army, although never intending to be a career soldier. After that began a life as the purchaser of about 200 cars including Hispano-Suizas, Rolls-Royces, Bugattis, Jaguars, Ferraris, Maseratis “and a rather nice Cisitalia, which I raced”. It did not make him a rich man. “He was playing with cars when they were not worth a huge amount,” said his son.
Crabbe’s heart was in Scotland but his father’s estate was ultimately sold and for 32 years he and his wife lived in an old rectory in Lincolnshire. Fiona (née Staveley) was his secretary when he possessed a showroom in London for a short while and they married in 1972. She predeceased him in 2018 and he is survived by their children, Alastair, who lives near Silverstone and is a financial services specialist, and Lucinda, a housewife, who lives in Putney, southwest London. A second daughter, Sophie, died in 2019. Crabbe’s father, according to Alastair, was “quietly very proud of his son’s career. Archie went to Monaco with the F1 team, was down in the pits and liked the glamour behind it.”
The glamour extended to the glitterati whom Crabbe encountered. In addition to the drivers such as Hunt, Jackie Stewart, whom he greatly respected, and Jody Scheckter, whom he found a hard South African, he mixed with the actors Paul Newman and Robert Wagner, whom he met in Indianapolis while they were on the set of Winning, a film about motor racing, He preferred the latter. Crabbe once instructed Prince Michael of Kent, his fellow member of White’s, on the intricacies of driving during a car rally in Russia.
It was not always a glamorous life. On one occasion when he came out of retirement to race, at a rally in Tunisia in 1997, a sandstorm impaired many of the cars and his wife took off her tights so he could use them as an extra air filter over the carburettors in his prewar BMW. “They were desperate measures,” said Alastair.
Colin Crabbe, motor racing driver and entrepreneur, was born on April 14, 1942. He died of cancer on March 7, 2025, aged 82
