Jim Clark: A Cut Above

Part One: Mr Versatile

When Jim Clark roared across the finish line at Kyalami 40 years ago this week to take victory in the South African Grand Prix, it seemed like the resumption of normal service. Another year, another victory and, most likely, another championship.

He had just become the most successful Grand Prix driver in history, his total of 25 wins surpassing Fangio's previous benchmark. Few could have even contemplated at this point that he had less than 100 days to live.

Clark was an inspiration to the other drivers who raced against him for his smooth driving style, his fair play on the track and the fact that, although he was a double world champion and Indy 500 winner, he showed absolutely no pretensions.

Incredibly, Clark had never so much as broken his skin in a racing accident, let alone hurt himself. It really seemed as if he was invincible. Much of this aura of invincibility stemmed from Clark's masterful ability to control and adapt to a wide variety of cars.

Alan McCall, who worked with Clark as a mechanic on his Formula 1, Indy and saloon cars, says "All Jimmy ever wanted was a car that repeated. He could adapt himself to anything, provided he knew what the recipe was".

Gordon Huckle, McCall's colleague in 1967, agrees:

"He was a 'make-do' driver. In practice he'd come in and say 'Oh, so-and-so's not quite right' - perhaps he was just catching his hand on the gear lever or something. After practice you'd say to him 'OK Jim, where do you want it?' and he'd think for a minute and say 'Oh, leave it, I've got used to it'.

"Certainly he didn't like the car to be pulled around too much. You'd say to him 'Well, let's have your job list Jim, what do you want done?' and he'd say 'Well, look, if you really want to do something, polish it'."

There was also probably an ulterior motive for Clark in keeping any changes and modifications to a minimum to improve both reliability and safety, as Huckle points out:

"He used to, on the quiet, keep at Chapman to stop him from doing all the changes he wanted, because Chapman was forever coming up with new ideas and wanting things done."

The 1967 season with the Lotus 49 was a good example of Clark's desire not to fiddle with set-up.

"That whole year we hardly changed anything - until we went to the Nurburgring," Huckle recalls.

"Early in practice, he came in and there was a big discussion with Chapman and it was agreed that maybe a little bit more oversteer wouldn't hurt the car, and so they shifted the rear roll bar up half an inch. Jimmy went out and did a lap, came straight in and said 'Put it back'.

"Other than that, at the British GP, he was having a slight understeer problem at Woodcote, which in those days was a flat-out bit of a big old corner. It was decided to put another eighth of a degree of negative on the outside front wheel.

"Straight after the race [which Clark won], I went to Jimmy. He put his hand on my shoulder and the very first words he said to me as he got out of the car were 'Putting that negative on the front was a mistake, take it out again'. The roll bar and that were the two adjustments, basically, made to that car all year."

Clark was Mr Versatile. In the early to mid 1960s, there would often be race meetings where Clark would be behind the wheel of a Formula 1 car, a sports car and a saloon car, each driven to victory with great verve and gusto.

Similarly, time and time again he would jump into a strange car and almost immediately be fast, often considerably quicker than the regular occupant of the cockpit.

At Rouen in 1964 for the French Grand Prix, he was fascinated by the cars assembled for a vintage car race supporting the main event. The Honorable Patrick Lindsay offered Clark the chance to drive his ERA 'Remus' and, within four laps, he had gone faster than Lindsay - indeed, faster than any ERA - had ever been round the track.

Former Team Lotus mechanic Bob Sparshott recalls a similar example:

"We did a race in Zolder. He had never driven there, and he'd been practising in America [for the 1967 Indy 500].

"He was scheduled to come into Brussels, pick up a rental car and drive out to Zolder, getting there about an hour before practice. Well, they lost his stuff! They couldn't find his helmet bag, he was in a fearful state.

"He had to abandon looking for it at the airport and drive to the track without overalls and helmet, and he got there very near to when practice was due to start.

"Jean-Pierre Beltoise, who was about the same size, lent him a hat and some overalls. We had a brand-new car [the Lotus 48] and an old car. He said, 'Well, we might as well start off in the new car anyway, seeing as how I don't know the track'. He went out, learnt the circuit and was second quickest in the session!"

A few months later, Clark won first time out in the Lotus 49 and Ford Cosworth DFV's respective debuts, in the Dutch Grand Prix, in a car he had never even seen, let alone driven. Allan McCall takes up the story:

"Jimmy never got to run the car before we went to Zandvoort because of his tax situation [he was living in exile and unable to make many visits to the UK].

"The very first time he saw and got into that car was at that meeting. He virtually drove the car as Chapman had presented it: roll bars, springs - there might have been a little fiddle around but basically he drove the car exactly as presented."

Another example of his tremendous adaptability was when he rose to the challenge of rallying, competing for Ford in a Lotus-Cortina in the 1966 RAC Rally.

Not only did he take to it like the proverbial duck to water, he took the fight to the all-conquering Swedes, setting fastest times on three stages, being second fastest seven times and third fastest four times before being eliminated in a crash, ironically in his beloved Borders region of Scotland.

Even during the crash that ended his rally, Clark showed tremendous presence of mind, as his co-driver Brian Melia explains:

"We got on one of these fairly straight tracks with the jumps and he put his foot to the boards, and bounced along this thing and of course the car started to yaw until it dug the right hand front wheel into the soft. It started to roll, then it hit a bank and it actually jumped up in the air and spun over a river and finished up over the other side.

"Afterwards, you could see our trajectory because you could see where we had mowed all these saplings down. Then you got to the place where we had taken off, and you could see where we had chopped them off at different heights.

"During this time, Jimmy was conscious that he'd got his feet planted on the pedals. All he was concerned about was the engine.

"'God', he said, 'while we were going over I was desperately trying to keep my feet off it [the throttle pedal] because I didn't want to blow the engine up'. I was just worrying about whether we were going to get out the other side safely!"

Yet his uncanny ability to adapt to changes in the handling characteristics of a car could also count against him, as Sir Jack Brabham recalls:

"He didn't have a very good feel for the car which, I am absolutely certain, was what got him in the end.

"I raced against him at Rouen once. There were four of us in the race for the lead, always passing one another, and Jim had a tyre going down and everybody knew about it except Jim. We couldn't believe he didn't know.

"When we went off down the hill for the last time, I just chickened out. There was no way Jim was going to get to the bottom of the hill with that tyre - he just couldn't do it. Sure enough, on the first right-hand bend on the way down, he lost it.

"I had backed off to give them all plenty of room to have the accident. Unfortunately, the other two boys went past when he was in the bank and he bounced back and I took the whole radiator off the front of his car."

There are other instances of this, including a photo taken during the Italian Grand Prix at Monza in 1967 when Brabham forced his way up the inside of the Scot at the Parabolica and pointed to Clark's car to bring a deflating tyre to his attention.

Oddly enough, there are also plenty of stories about times when Clark was able to detect almost imperceptible issues with his cars and resolutely refused to go out until the mechanics had found and sorted the problem. These seem to suggest that he did have a good awareness of his car's internals, but that perhaps tyres was one area of weakness.

Certainly, his mechanical sympathy was legendary among those who worked with him. Keith Duckworth, designer of the all-conquering Ford Cosworth DFV engine says, "You could actually tell the difference between a Graham Hill and a Jim Clark engine.

"Clark would have apologised for having over-revved it on two or three occasions but the valve gear would show no signs of having been over-revved, whereas Graham insisted his had never been over-revved and yet the valve gear was quite often tatty.

"Clark just changed gear gently, didn't he? There was never any hurry about anything, he had bags of time because he was incredibly good."

Alan McCall continues: "Jimmy carried so much speed in a corner and into a corner. He could, no trouble, run a couple of meetings on the same set of brake pads. And Graham couldn't get through a weekend. Jimmy never used brakes really, he was just the magic that he was."

Bob Dance, who worked with Clark on the saloon car and Formula 2 sections, concurs. "Even in the Lotus Cortinas he never used as much brakes or fuel. He just had an uncanny knack of doing it right."

For someone so sublime on the track, away of the cockpit of a racing car, Clark was often nervous and indecisive. He was famous for biting his nails down to the quick and had several road accidents at the same junction near his home because he left the decision too late as to which fork in the road to take.

Jackie Stewart, who for a while shared a flat with Clark in London in the mid-sixties, tells how they would try to go out to catch a movie but by the time Jim had decided which one he wanted to see, it was too late, because the film had already begun.

Clark also suffered from pre-race nerves, something one of his rivals sought to exploit.

"Jim was someone who was always tweaked up at the start" says Brabham. "He was a nerve case. A couple of times on the grid when I was alongside him, just before the flag went, I would point to his wheel or some part of the car and start waving at him. He would get really tweaked up.

"Maybe that's why, when we were pointing at his tyre when it really was going flat, he didn't take any bloody notice of us".

Such pre-race nerves often translated into tremendous early-race pace, as McCall observes. "Jimmy had his way of rushing out in the races, mainly because he always thought it was dangerous to race with people. His thing was 'get away from the maniacs'".

Clark's sublime driving talent, versatility and mechanical sympathy combined to make a formidable package. He made winning look easy because he was able to go fast with less effort than most of his rivals. As McCall puts it: "Some people can operate on a different plane, and Jimmy was one of those.

"I imagine Nuvolari and Fangio were too. Everybody thinks he was going to be miles quicker. It was never the case. Jimmy could just go quickly, easier than the other guys. They all had the same terminal velocity, if you know what I mean."

Next Week: the Great Drives

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