Kobus Reyneke Has a Horse for Every Course

You might say the old British idiom “horses for courses” was coined to illustrate the cars of Kobus Reyneke. Quite simply, it means that different people, or in this case, machines, are best suited to particular situations.

Reyneke grew up in South Africa in a non-car-fancying family. His father always drove a Chevy but for no particular reason. His mom had a Morris Minor, and when Kobus was around six, she would take him to a dirt road, have him sit on her lap, and let him steer the car. Pretty soon, he was shifting gears as well. Whether it was that sort of experience or just an innate predilection, Kobus was naturally attracted to cars. 

Like many boys his age, he was doodling his favorites while in class. A buddy’s father got Road & Track, and it was passed around amongst his friends, who would then discuss all the machines they had read about.  The next step for him was building model cars. Reyneke would buy kits, build them, and then take them apart, mix parts from other kits, and make his own hybrid hot rods. Then it was on to Scalextric slot cars. Reyneke and five of his friends all had tracks. They would get together at one kid’s house, create a massive two-lane track, and have match races.  For hours, their 1/24-scale Lolas, Ferraris, and Cheetas did battle for track dominance. Eventually, big tracks started filling his time.

“At 14 or 15, my dad started taking us to Kyalami to watch the Grand Prix races. He would drop me and my friends off with sleeping bags the day before the races, and we would sleep in the stands. We would watch the race, drink too much (somehow, we sneaked alcohol in), and just have a big party. In my second-to-last year in high school, my brother, who was ahead of me in college and worked on the college paper, wrote to the track and got me, a 16-year-old kid, a photographic credential for three years of  Grand Prix and nine-hour races. I was literally eight feet from the track with my Pentax Spotmatic.”

Reyneke soon went off to college at the University of Pretoria, and that was when he got his first set of wheels.

“My first year, I had a Ford Prefect that was a hand-me-down from my brother. I drove that car like a bat out of hell. One time, my friends and I finished our first exams. There were two of us in the front and three or four in the back. We made a mad dash to the bar, and on the last turn before the bar, we hit a dip in the road, and the car went up on two wheels. I was looking out my window, and all I saw was pavement.” Somehow the car made it back to earth, and the whole gang of them laughed for hours about it. 

After Reyneke’s first year at engineering school, his father bought him a new 1972 Toyota Corolla, about as unsporting as a car can be. But it was a trooper. “That car took me everywhere,” he says. “We would think nothing of driving a couple of hundred miles down to the Zulu Coast to go spearfishing—other times to Mozambique. We would finish classes on Friday, jump in the car, and drive through the night. Sleep in the car, and when the sun rose, we would go spearfishing. We would dive for two days, get back in the car Sunday night, and be in class Monday morning.”

Because of the Apartheid regime, television didn’t arrive in the country until 1975. This was Reyneke’s last year of college, so he had never seen any of the big races in other parts of the world. “It was also the year I got my first collectible car,” he says. “A Triumph TR3A.”

Reyneke drove the Triumph during his final days at college and into his first job as an engineer at a steel plant. In 1978, he emigrated to the U.S. to study for his MBA in Miami.

“For a few years, nothing was happening with cars. I got a job in New York City and wasn’t making much money. In 1982, I went to the first Historic Festival at Lime Rock. This was my first vintage race in the U.S. I instantly fell in love. I wanted to be a part of it, but I felt it was way too expensive. So, for years, I got my pleasure vicariously through going to these vintage events.”

In 2019, Reyneke says he could finally afford to buy something to race with, and he put his money into a 1959 Porsche 356 Cabriolet. About the same time, he got connected with Chris Turner and Gaspare Fasulo of Gaswerks Garage. Fasulo rebuilt the engine and transmission and got the car running perfectly. 

“Chris and Gaspare were vintage racing with the VSCCA (Vintage Sports Car Club of America) and told me I should join them. This was 2020, and then Covid-19 canceled the first race of the season.” Reyneke expressed his interest in going racing with Charles Bordin of the VSCCA, who told him that as long as he had been through a racing school, he could join the club on the track. “I had taken the Bertil Roos [racing school] just before the club’s first event that June, so I bought a racing suit, helmet, and all that other crap. I put painter’s tape over the headlights, used it to make numbers on the sides of my 356, and went racing with the VSCCA.” 

Reyneke had jumped straight into the deep end. “It was very intimidating, as this was my first real racing experience,” he says. “Racing school just gives you a taste of what happens. Once you start racing, it’s a whole different story.  I made some mistakes, but I survived.”

A year later, Reyneke truly fell under Chris and Gaspare’s spell, and that got him into a Porsche 912.

“Gaspare added his magic to the 912 and turned it into more of a hot rod than an all-out race car, as it still had a complete interior, but it did have a fuel cell and roll bar.” Adding the 912 to the stable didn’t mean the 356 sat in a corner, however. Reyneke entered the Great Race with his little silver car. “We covered 2300 miles, from Warwick, Rhode Island, to Fargo, North Dakota, plus the drive from New Jersey to Rhode Island to get to the starting line.”

The Great Race is a regularity rally, where the use of electronic devices is against the rules; even cell phones must be stowed. Instead, you prepare tables according to your car’s acceleration and deceleration performance. Each day, precisely 30 minutes before their official start time, teams get a 24-page booklet with detailed instructions for that day’s stage. The test is to follow the directions perfectly so you arrive at the finish line at your designated time.

Reyneke enlisted Gaswerks to prep the 356 for the rally, ensuring it wouldn’t skip a beat. That included the installation of a special magnetic pickup and cable to feed the highly accurate event speedometer. “We also added a clock that could have done better,” he says. “On the second-to-last day, we made a five-minute mistake. If not for that, my co-pilot Andre Van Rensburg and I would have finished 66th overall instead of down in 87th place, and 13th out of 40 rookies. We had a great time, but it becomes a job if you stress over it. We were there to have fun.”

Reyneke next tried his hand at open-wheel racing, but that became a stressor for entirely different reasons. A fellow racer with several cars had a Formula Vee with a good history and was looking for a buyer. The 912 was seeing a lot of action on track, so he figured a switch to something different would be a good break for the Porsche. He pulled the trigger on the Formula Vee, took time to fix it up, and then went racing for a year. “It was fantastic! Open-wheel racing was the best thing I could do on a track. The only problem was that there were not enough of us to make an entire group, so I was out there with MGs and other sports cars, and I knew they just couldn’t see me in my little V when I would come up behind them or be alongside them. It made me too uneasy.”

Curiously, the Vee was not the smallest car in Reyneke’s stable. In the summer of 2020, deep in the throes of lockdown and looking for something new, he stumbled across cyclekarts. “I started doing some research and latched onto a guy up near Albany who has now become a good friend. In late fall, he invited me up to see his cyclekart. I was in love, and I committed. For the next year, I went about building my own.” 

Cyclekarts are inspired by prewar race cars, only in miniature. Reyneke decided to make his 212-cc machine a homage to Fiat’s famous 28-liter S76 of 1910, known as the Beast of Turin. “I met a guy who works on old Maseratis, and he did some of the panel-beating for me. I also ended up in the shop doing some of the work myself under his watchful eye.” 

Much of the racing in the Northeast takes place on local farms, he says. “But at one point, 50 of us were racing through the streets of Huntsville, Alabama. And in the winter, we race on ice. It is a blast behind the wheel. We beat on these little machines pretty hard and have wheel failures and the like, so we need to be prepared—half the time we spend talking and fixing each others’ cars.”

Selling the Vee was bittersweet for Reyneke, but it was the right thing to do. And he’d almost convinced himself he didn’t need anything else to replace it. Almost. Then, a 1960 Turner with Sebring history became available. He passed initially, but when it popped up again, he couldn’t resist. “I sat in it, and it was just so cool. I took it out for the final event of the season with the VSCCA, and it was like driving a go-kart. It had a few problems, but they are being taken care of. I see the Turner now as a focused track car and will use the 912 for rallies and a couple of choice wheel-to-wheel events.”

So, the 912 now has its place, as does the Turner. And the cyclekart is simply its own thing. But what if, say, Kobus Reyneke had a hankering for the sand? As a kid, he built hot rod models and always loved ’32 Fords. Now, he has the real thing.

“A friend of mine, Kim McCullough, has a rather famous ’32. I went to an open house at her and her husband’s garage, and in the middle of the room was this beat-up hot rod they had bought to compete in The Race of Gentlemen. I spoke to their mechanic, Graham Long, and I told him I would kill to have a car like this to race at TROG.”

The pair began looking for just such a car, and two years ago they found it, in Pennsylvania. It had a racing history from the 1950s on the Bonneville Salt Flats. It had a tow bar for flat towing and a push bar to get it started on speed runs. “And it came with an extra engine and all kinds of cool flathead parts,” Reyneke says. “It was just what I wanted. Graham worked the whole winter to get it ready for TROG. The pace picked up as the time drew near. He got it done just in time to trailer it down to Wildwood, New Jersey. I can’t remember how many runs I did, but it was crazy fun.”

From those humble Prefect and Corolla days in his native South Africa, Kobus Reyneke sure has come a long way. To say that he’s got a machine suited to every situation is an understatement. He wouldn’t have it any other way.