Hulme is champion 2 November 1967

ESTABLISHED 1895

THE 1967 F1 season, like the year before it, proved a fight between the Lotus and Brabham teams – but Jack Brabham wouldn’t run away with it this time.

Partner Denny Hulme had upped his game, and their battle went down to the final round with the odds heavily in his favour; Jim Clark and Graham Hill had faster cars, but they had been very unreliable.

True to form, Clark took pole for Lotus in Mexico, with the Ferrari of Chris Amon beside him and the Brabhams on row three.

After a shambolic start, the leaders at the end of lap one were Hill, Amon, Clark and Brabham, with Hulme down in eighth.

The brilliance of Clark shone again, though, as he had zoomed into a 2sec lead by lap three’s end.

“Hulme is trying hard to pass John Surtees and finally manages it on lap six,” we said. “But it takes him six more laps to get by [Lotus’s] Moisés Solana, by which time Brabham is nearly 10sec ahead.”

Then Lotus’s gremlins struck again, as Solana’s suspension broke before Hill’s drive shaft gave up.

But “by lap 53, Clark has increased his lead to 40sec and has lapped Surtees. Eight rounds later he laps Hulme, and then Brabham finds himself second as Amon’s Ferrari runs out of fuel.”

Clark finished first from Brabham and Hulme, and so the title went to the latter, who just casually strode back to the pit lane.

“This popular champion leaves a lesson: that it’s much more satisfying to win when the odds are against you than to overwhelm the opposition with an infinitely superior machine.”