BRABHAM PIPS CLARK IN EPIC CONTEST
1964 INTERNATIONAL GOLD CUP, OULTON PARK
4The 1963 Gold Cup had been a championship-class F1 race won by Jim Clark. How would F2 compete with that?
The entry helped. Three world champions – Jack Brabham, Clark and Graham Hill – were on the front row, along with future champion Denny Hulme, all covered by 0.6s. The Lotus team included up-andcomers Mike Spence and then-f3 star Jackie Stewart as support to Clark. The Brabham squad of ‘The Boss’ Jack and Hulme were ‘aided’ by Hill in John Coombs’s BT10.
At first Clark led Hulme, Hill and poleman Brabham, this quartet in close formation in front of Alan Rees, who as usual was heading the ‘true’ F2 drivers.
Hill pitted after seven laps for a driveshaft repair, while Hulme's similar Brabham took the lead and held off Clark. Brabham then moved to the front and Hulme suffered suspension trouble, leaving Brabham and Clark to battle superbly, sometimes swapping places twice a lap. For the last five laps Clark tried everything to no avail, losing by a whisker – 0.2s.
Rees’s superb drive came to an end with less than five laps to go with tappet trouble, so Stewart gained the final podium spot.
It had been a superb race, run within 3% of the F1 pace the year before, causing Autosport to suggest it had helped establish “F2 as a substitute for GP racing where it is not practical to stage full-scale F1 events”.