The Jacobsens Go Racing

Photo of Leif Jacobsen at Laguna Seca race track, August 2017, taken by Dennis Gray of Sports Car Digest

Story by Michael A. Jacobsen

A few years back the then-President of the Society of Automotive Historians challenged the idea that the sports car movement in the USA was begun by servicemen returned from WWII having seen, driven and bought MGs, especially TCs, while abroad. As we know, something like half the total production of TCs were imported to the USA—that’s nearly 5000 cars—followed by many more TDs.

Event Programs from early road racing here on the West Coast show over half the entries were MGs which may be available for betting on sip777. The first race, at Buchanan Field in NorCal was organized by the local MG car club, while in SoCal, at the first Palm Springs races (April, 1950) two thirds of the thirty entries were MGs. Only one of these, the NB raced by my Dad Lars Jacobsen, was not a T-series MG. In supporting the role of the MG in the foreign car movement, these facts are most persuasive. My family’s experience backs this up.

While two of the three N-type Magnettes raced by my Dad in the 1950s were imported pre-war by the Collier Brothers, the one I still have and race was bought by a serviceman, Dick van Osten, in Cologne in 1947. He toured Europe in it with his new bride, and shipped it to Los Angeles, where in 1949 he sold it to his Balboa Island neighbor Harvey Mayer, who sold it to my Dad in 1953. Its original owner, Dr. Raetz of Cologne, raced it at the Nurburgring in 1936, after having replaced the original solid front axle with the rubberband independent front suspension it still has.

My uncle Pete Jacobsen was wounded in the European Theatre near the end of the war and spent several months recuperating in the English village of Beaminster. While attending Art Center on the GI Bill, he bought a TC. He hillclimbed with it at Willowsprings at least twice before rolling it on Orange Grove Blvd. in Pasadena about 1957. He also taught me how to slide and drift it on the parking lot of the Santa Anita horserace track.

My Godfather, William E. Velasco, scoffed at the new sports cars and especially my Dad’s racing them, but he accompanied Uncle Pete to Peter Satori’s foreign car dealership on Colorado St. in Pasadena one April, 1953, Saturday, and when Pete came back to the showroom from the parts department, Bill was sitting in his own new TD. I eventually owned this car and drove it during my sophomore and junior years at college. Uncle Pete also acquired Aunt Mary Ellen about 1952, and not long after her brother-in-law Leonard Popp pulled into our driveway on Washington St. in a dark green TC.

Lars Jacobsen had some experience as a sprint car and midget car racer pre-war, but Mom made him stop when my brother came along in 1941. He had also owned a type 40 Bugatti in the mid-thirties. My grandfather Hugo, uncle Pete, and Dad, built a Hudson/Terraplane hot rod, a hi-boy as they call them now, and raced it at the dry lakes immediately after the war. Because of this racing background, when friend Paul Reichert wanted to go racing with his MG N type 0877 in 1950, but could not drive it himself, he asked Dad to pilot the car. Lars raced it for Paul at the first Palm Springs (DNF), the one and only Santa Ana in June, 1950 (3^rd, after leading until the fuel pump acted up), the first Pebble Beach (retired from 4^th place) and numerous lesser venues. Dad enjoyed this so much he bought his own Magnette, # 0878, from Ben Franklin of Philadelphia, in November, 1951. Paul, back East on a business trip, towed it to Pasadena for us. Then in 1953 Dad bought Harvey Mayer’s car, which was in pieces at the time, to build into a lightweight special for racing. Though he won a hillclimb at Agoura over competition Porsches as late as 1955 in 0878, the stock-bodied cars were no longer competitive in most road racing.

The NA Special (0476), ex-Mayer, etc., was never quite finished though it was twice entered in events in 1956, at Paramount Ranch and Santa Barbara. After 1957 Dad raced Harry Crown’s three MG K3s in various vintage events through the 1970s. The last race for 0878 was at Mid-Ohio during a brief period from 1960-2 when my parents lived in Cleveland. It was summer, and Dad and I drove the Magnette, then supercharged, from Cleveland the 90 miles to Mansfield. We burned a cam bearing as soon as the car was on the track, and drove it home at 30 mph. When Dad died I sold 0878 to Don Martine, who recently passed it to Gerry Lettieri.

The Special sat at the back of Dad’s garage for thirty years, all its good parts eventually being used on 0878, until I convinced him to rebuild it in 1994 to go vintage racing. He did not live to see it race, but it has been on the track 100 times since 1997, most recently in the hands of my son, Leif Jacobsen, who led group 1A at last year’s Monterey Reunion until the rear brakes burned up as a result of the handbrake not releasing. We expect to be at the Moss-sponsored Buttonwillow British Extravaganza this year as usual.

[It is with heavy hearts that we relay that Michael Jacobsen passed away in September of 2016. His son Leif has worked at Moss Motors as a salesperson since 2008 and continues the proud motoring legacy of the Jacobsen family. ~Ed.]