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By Buffy Swanson
Crew chief for several top drivers on the circuit starting with his brother, Doug, in 1980, Pennsy native Davey Hoffman has been chosen to receive this year’s Hall of Fame Mechanic/Engineering Award. Presentation ceremonies will take place on Wednesday, July 10, at the Northeast Dirt Modified Museum and Hall of Fame on the grounds of Weedsport Speedway in New York.
Hoffman was a farm kid from Allentown, PA, with no knowledge of racing until his brothers and buddies pooled together a couple hundred bucks to buy a Late Model for Dorney Park in 1977. They all put their names in a hat to see who would drive—and Doug’s name got pulled. He won his fifth time out—and the Hoffmans were hooked.
“My dad wouldn’t even let the Late Model on the farm at first. My oldest brother Michael kept it at his house,” Hoffman said. “Then we needed something welded one night and Dad said, ‘Well, bring it up!’ And then he kinda got the itch.”
They raced out of an old chicken coop on the farm, figuring things out on their own, until they came to the realization that paved-track racing was a dead end in their region of Pennsylvania.
A visit to Budd Olsen Speed Supply in late 1979 put them on dirt at Bridgeport the following season—and they lost half their crew. “It was too far to go,” Hoffman pointed out. Only childhood friends Mark Stahley and Jan Gower followed Doug and Davey for the weekly two-hour drive down the Schuylkill.
Hall of Famer Budd Olsen saw promise and took a personal interest in the Hoffman boys—grooming Doug as a driver and tapping Davey as crew chief.
“I guess I had the ability to watch a race car,” Hoffman recollected. “I don’t watch the races—I watch the race car. I don’t care if we’re running first or 15th—I watch what the car’s doing. To this day, when I go to the race track, I know that other guys just don’t see what I see, until maybe I mention it. ‘Didja see we really turned loose off of four?’ Oh, yeah, yeah…
“I’ve got the ability to do that. And the Olsens were just huge—Budd was a good mentor to Doug; and our maintenance was top shelf. Because we wanted to win races, we wanted to be recognized. So we worked really hard at it.”
Their farmer’s work ethic and perseverance paid off. Doug exploded on the scene, winning 29 times in 1982, upping that total to 40 in ’83 and matching that whopping win number in ’84.
“I can’t tell you how we managed to do what we did,” Davey considered. “Olsen gave me a lot of connections—people I could talk to. Hey, I’m not afraid to call someone that’s way smarter than me to get the answer.
“But really, most of it was trial and error.”
At that time, track tire rules were wide open—for the most part, there weren’t any. Hoosier Tire, just entering the dirt Modified market, was happy to work with a big winner like Doug Hoffman. So Davey became Hoosier’s go-to for feedback and R&D.
The business—Hoffman Bros. Speed Supply, established in 1985—was an offshoot of frustration with Big Diamond Raceway’s tire supplier. “We would go there and the guy didn’t have tires! So I started selling tires,” Hoffman said. Promoter Fritz Roehrig then asked them to supply a parts truck as well, and the enterprise took off, with Doug funding the initiative and Davey coming off the road to run it.
But his innate ability to interpret what a race car needed—particularly in regard to tire management—kept Davey in demand as a crew chief.
He turned down a job offer from Brett Hearn in 1984, and continued to help his brother on and off, as Doug graduated from the family car to fully-funded rides. When Doug did the unthinkable in 1989—leaving Olsen to partner with Bicknell race cars—Davey was a part of the transition. Recognizing talent, Randy Williamson tried to hire Davey to work at Bicknell, but couldn’t gain the clearances needed to get him across the Canadian border.
“Doug was a great driver but he didn’t know anything about race cars,” Williamson observed. “That was all Davey.”
He wasn’t the only one taking notice: when Frank Cozze was putting his team together for the big season-end races in 1989, he was quick to call Hoffman.
“I needed a tire guy—that was back when you could run any tire. And I knew he knew the tires because Doug was running great,” Cozze said. “And after I got him, I realized that he not only knew tires—he knew basically everything about the race car. Which kind of surprised me because I didn’t know that he was that sharp. So that turned out to be a two-for-one for me.”
Hoffman’s first of multiple stints with Cozze lasted through 1990. “We won a lot of races because he would pick a tire that nobody else did. Not only that, but he knew how to prep them—that was before anyone really knew how to prep tires, or even if there was a way to prep them. He was ahead of a lot of guys on that. And I don’t think he learned that from Olsen. I just think he learned it from doing it.”
According to Randy Williamson, “There is no one better at tire management than Davey Hoffman. He put Frank Cozze in position to win Syracuse twice.”
Hoffman explained, “That’s when Hoosier built that rain tire. He was on McCrearys and I said to Frank, ‘I don’t know those tires! I know our Hoosiers are good.’ So Frank said, ‘If you know ’em better, that’s what we’ll use.’ I just knew what they could do up there,” he recalled their 1989 Syracuse effort, which put Cozze in the lead until a tangle with Danny Johnson took both of them out with seven to go.
Together again at Syracuse in 2008, Cozze finally won DIRTcar’s biggest race with Hoffman setting tire strategy.
A bit of a gypsy, Davey has bounced around in his career. From 1995-96, he crewed for Billy Pauch, his brother’s old nemesis. He’s returned to the family speed shop, now operated by his younger brother Keith, to work in fabrication and repairs. He’s taken long breaks from racing to return to farming life in Montana, where his wife’s family resided.
But he’s always come home.
“Like Roy Pauch told me: ‘Racing’s like cancer. You’ll never get rid of it!’ Very good point. He was so right!” Hoffman said. “Why do you think I’m back here again? It gets your blood flowing, makes you think.”
