Lotus
49 Cosworth 1967
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 30 years since
has been
surpassed only by five drivers (Jackie
Stewart, Nigel Mansell,
Alain Prost, Michael
Schumacher and Aryton Senna),
all of whom benefited from a much longer GP 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 team mate) when an oil leak caused
a DNF while leading the final race (and the season points)
at Kyalami. He won handily in 1963, and repeated in
1965, taking 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 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 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 now located behind a protective
Armco guardrail is set in the trees to mark the
spot of his tragic death.
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 sponsorhip 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."
Jim
Clark's Career Profile |
Seasons |
Races |
Wins |
Poles |
Fastest
Laps |
Points |
F1 Titles |
9 |
72 |
25 |
33 |
28 |
274 |
2 |
|