Jim Clark

Jim Clark drove his entire F1 career for Colin Chapman’s Team Lotus, winning two Formula One World Championships and the 1965 Indianapolis 500. Clark’s total of 25 career GP wins broke the record set by the legendary Juan Manuel Fangio, and in the more than 40 years since has been surpassed only by six drivers (Jackie Stewart, Nigel Mansell, Alain Prost, Michael Schumacher, Aryton Senna and Fernando Alonso), all of whom benefited from a much longer Grand Prix season.

After an initial controversy at Monza in 1961, where he was involved in an accident that claimed the life of Wolfgang von Trips, giving the World Championship to American Phil Hill and his famous shark-nosed Ferrari 156, Clark barely lost the 1962 title to Graham Hill (then driving for BRM — “British Racing Motors” — but later a Lotus teammate) when an oil leak caused a DNF while leading the final race (and the season points) at Prince George’s in South Africa. He won handily in 1963, and repeated in 1965, scoring the maximum possible championship points in both seasons. All this despite taking May off each year, and missing Monaco, to compete in and become the first Briton to win at the Brickyard. The Clark-driven Lotus was mostly only ever beaten when the mechanical side of the equation failed to deliver. The action photo below is from the 1967 Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort, which Clark won in the revolutionary Lotus 49 with the then-new Ford Cosworth DFV 3.0 V8 engine — the power plant that would go on to dominate Formula One for nearly two decades.

Clark won the opening race of the 1968 season in South Africa, but died on 7 April 1968 during an inconsequential F2 race at Hockenheim, Germany, in an accident that to this day remains unexplained, when his Lotus left the track and crashed into nearby trees. A small plaque — located behind a protective Armco guardrail — is set in the trees to mark the spot of his tragic death. Even more sadly, the Hockenheimring was reconfigured in 2001 to take away

After all, Jim Clark was the best of the best.

— Ayrton Senna —

its classic long straights through the forest and then dropped as the home of the German Grand Prix in favor of an equally emasculated Nürburgring, making that small monument itself now a part of F1 history.

Jim Clark was an intuitive racer, competing in all classes and disciplines. He won four straight Belgian GPs at the tremendously difficult Spa-Francorchamps circuit, a track he despised, and was masterful in wet conditions. His dominant 1965 season in the Lotus 33 — in which he led every lap of every race he finished — is unmatched in F1 history. But the single fact which tells the most about him is that only once did Clark finish second; in other words, if he made it to the flag, he invariably made it before anyone else. Whether Clark, a private and soft-spoken man, would have prospered in the modern era of F1 sponsorship and downforce will never be known, but his absence ended a time of relative innocence in Formula One. As Chris Amon, then with Ferrari, said in 1968, “If it could happen to him, what chance did the rest of us have? I think we all felt that. It seemed like we’d lost our leader.”

Other Jim Clark Sites

Formula1.com Hall of Fame
Wikipedia Article
TimesOnline 40th Anniversary Profile
“Remember Jim Clark“ by Roger Horton
Biography by Dennis David
GP Encyclopedia
AutoSport—F1′s Greatest Drivers
ESPN F1 Profile
F1 Pulse Profile
Hockenheim Historic Memorial

Jim Clark Video