LOTUS PT2: THE JIM CLARK ERA
The Lotus marque’s values crystallised in the 1960s as founder Colin Chapman met his perfect foil: the peerless Jim Clark. But Chapman’s technological tours de force were fragile as well as fast…
Fifty-three years he’s been gone. Yet Jim Clark in a British Racing Green Lotus with a vivid yellow stripe still represents the very best of Formula 1. Beware the instinct to beatify our racing heroes; Clark was no saint and he made mistakes (although not many). But beside Tazio Nuvolari, Juan Manuel Fangio and Stirling Moss, this mild-mannered Scottish sheep farmer remains as close to the embodiment of a perfect racing driver as we’re ever likely to see. Yes, the racing record was near-spotless, but more than that, no one ever had a bad word to say about Jimmy – the quiet maestro who defines a golden decade.
But like his sixties contemporaries John Lennon and Paul Mccartney, for us to see the best of him Clark needed a partner, a foil, a perfectly in tune accomplice. Colin Chapman intuitively understood the man who would become his muse and, once that alliance was formed, it would colour the rest of his life.
Naturally, Chapman was quick to spot the potential in the guy with the bitten finger nails, but still it took time for the partnership to earn its wings. In 1961, the first year of a new 1.5-litre engine formula hated by the emerging British contingent, Stirling Moss and his patron Rob Walker led the charge ahead of Team Lotus against Ferrari’s striking ‘sharknose’ 156, Maranello having stolen a march with its powerful V6 developed in Formula 2.
The British revolution was checked, briefly, although Moss worked unforgettable wonders despite a sponsor clash keeping him at arm’s length from Chapman’s most cutting-edge equipment. Still, the boxy type 18 served Stirling’s needs perfectly around Monaco’s streets where he claimed arguably his greatest grand prix victory, although Walker rated the one at the Nürburgring above it, in a hybrid 18/21 sculpted to smoother, elliptic lines.
Over at Team Lotus, Clark wasn’t yet the finished article. He was sensational in practice at Monaco until he crashed heavily at Ste Dévote, then finished third in the Dutch and French GPS and won at Pau for a first (non-championship) F1 win. But his unwitting involvement in the fatal crash at Monza that claimed Wolfgang von Trips and 14 spectators haunted him for the rest of his life. At Spa a year earlier, he’d almost run over the body of poor Chris Bristow. No one could have blamed Clark had he turned on his heel and returned to his sheep farm. But there was steel inside that buttoned cardigan exterior.
That season, team-mate Innes Ireland shone at
(pointless) Solitude where he passed Jo Bonnier’s Porsche on the grass at the last corner. As Ireland headed off chasing Bonnier and Dan Gurney for that final lap, Chapman had turned to his team and said: “Either old Innes is going to win this race or that’s the last we’ll ever see of him…” This was a brave racing driver, underrated by too many – Chapman included. It was Innes who finally broke Team Lotus’s world championship grand prix duck at season-ending Watkins Glen – and he was rewarded just days later with the sack. Colin frowned at Ireland’s unruly and gloriously defiant lack of dedication, already out of its time. Brutal, certainly, but unarguable hindsight outweighs sentiment as Chapman put his faith in Clark. Ireland’s frontline career never recovered.
The landmark Lotus 25 upped the ante for everyone in 1962. In the type 24, a traditional spaceframe evolution of the 21, Chapman had already shuffled things along. But it turned out the 24 was just for customers… for Team Lotus, he had something else up his sleeve, evolving in a corner of the Cheshunt factory under the care of mechanics Dick Scammell and Ted Woodley, with Mike Costin on rivet duty.
Monocoques – lashed from the Greek for ‘single’ and the Latin ‘coccum’ for ‘shell’ – had been used in automotive construction almost as early as they were for aeroplanes. The midsection of Jaguar’s D-type was the most notable monocoque in a racing car, until a lightbulb moment when Chapman considered the immense rigidity for little weight in the prototype Elan two-seater. Could such construction be used in a single-seater, he mused, as he sketched on a restaurant napkin?
The stressed-skin fuselage construction mated to Coventry Climax’s V8 was beautifully conceived and presented. When Team Lotus
NO ONE COULD HAVE BLAMED CLARK HAD HE RETURNED TO HIS SHEEP FARM. BUT THERE WAS STEEL INSIDE THAT BUTTONED CARDIGAN EXTERIOR
rolled the 25 into the Dutch GP paddock, Ireland and the Udt-laystall customer team he now drove for immediately asked when theirs would be ready. Ah, this was the ‘experimental 1963 car’, replied Chapman… Innes’s mood with his former boss took another downturn.
Clark led first time out at Zandvoort, then came from P12 at Spa to claim his first points-scoring grand prix victory – by 44 seconds. He’d blitz the British GP at Aintree too, but inadvertently flicked his fuel pump off at the start in Germany and was forced to dig deeper than usual to finish fourth. That didn’t help his world championship cause as he engaged in a season-long battle for supremacy with Lotus old boy Graham Hill, now thriving at BRM. After Clark’s win at Watkins Glen, he trailed Hill with just South Africa to go. Jimmy stormed away in East London – only for ominous smoke to signal Lotus was still falling short. A bolt had dropped out of the engine crankcase and his oil leaked away, along with his title hopes. In the pitlane a bearded Stirling Moss looked on, still in recovery from the shunt, in a Lotus 24, that had ended his career at the Goodwood Easter Monday meet. Here was the major ‘what if’ loss of the 1960s: Moss was still at the top of his game just as Clark was coming to the boil. One of F1’s greatest rivalries was over before it had truly begun.
Small margins carry weight in F1, never more so than in the case of Clark and Lotus. In 1962 and 1964, Jimmy did all that was required to win tense title finales, only for his machinery to let him down. Without that oil leak at East London or a split oil line on the last lap in Mexico City two years later, Clark would have been a four-time consecutive world champion by the middle of the decade, instead of ‘only’ twice a champ. He drove in a wonderful era, against Hill, John Surtees, Dan Gurney, Jack Brabham and Jackie Stewart – but with the greatest respect to them all, this was Jimmy’s time. When Lotus and Climax V8 held together, invariably he won. It’s telling Clark only once came second in a points-paying GP, to Surtees after a titanic duel at the Nürburgring in 1963 – and that was with a sick engine. Did he have great racecraft? Perhaps not. He could be fallible under pressure (see the 1965 Race of Champions at Brands Hatch, when he smacked the bank as Gurney turned up the heat). But in a Lotus he didn’t need racecraft most of the time.
As for the type 25, it claimed 14 world championship grand prix wins and 11 non-points victories, while the evolutionary 33 kept the ball rolling. Clark owned the 1.5-litre era. First consider 1963: seven grand prix victories out of 10, including three ‘grand slams’ (pole, victory, fastest lap, led every lap) and a masterclass at Spa where he only started from the third row, led by Eau Rouge, held a 30-second cushion by half-distance and negotiated a thunderstorm and downpour to lap everyone bar Bruce Mclaren, who started his last lap as Clark took the chequer. Winning margin: just shy of five minutes...
Reliability and a lack thereof, plus a fine second half of the season from Surtees, cost Clark in 1964 – although he did three-wheel his way to the British Saloon Car Championship in a Lotus Cortina (imagine Lewis Hamilton squeezing
CLARK EMBARKED ON SURELY THE GREATEST SINGLE CAMPAIGN BY ANY RACING DRIVER
that in today). Then in 1965 Clark embarked on surely the greatest single campaign by any racing driver: among F2 wins and a Tasman crown Down Under, Clark spiked six consecutive grand prix victories, not counting the Monaco GP which he missed – because he was busy winning the Indianapolis 500.
The dominant victory at The Brickyard in Len Terry’s svelte Lotus 38 marked the culmination of a project to conquer the lucrative race that had started back in 1962. A year earlier, Jack Brabham and Cooper made what amounted to a reconnaissance mission that opened a chink for a similar British-led rear-engined revolution to that which had swept through F1. But it was Gurney’s response to the Lotus 25 when it broke cover at Zandvoort that really sowed the seed for Chapman. “My God!” said Dan. “If someone took a car like this to Indianapolis they could win with it!” Gurney paid for Chapman’s airfare to visit the 500 and his eyes were opened to the possibilities, largely because the big-beast front-engined
roadsters reminded him of grand prix racing – in the 1930s… By happy coincidence, Ford was also casting its eye at Indy, an alliance was formed and Indycar racing changed forever.
Not that the locals were too happy. In 1963, a ‘rookie’ Clark (who took some time to warm to Indy’s charm) should have won on his Indy debut. Parnelli Jones, running ahead of him, was dropping oil and by USAC rules should have been called in. Officials turned a blind eye. But by 1965 there was no stopping the tidal wave that had crashed in from Europe. It’s an achievement that’s equal to anything Lotus and Chapman managed in F1.
Back home – from 1966, in Hethel, Norfolk – Lotus was thriving, Chapman an unstoppable force. But pity anyone who found themselves driving beside Clark in F1. Jimmy’s teammates during his zenith seemed cursed, as he (unintentionally) drew the lion’s share of Chapman’s attention. Their fates offer a stark reminder of just how fierce motor racing was back then. Trevor Taylor, Peter Arundell and Mike Spence all shone at Team Lotus – but it didn’t end well for any of them.
Yorkshireman Taylor was spooked by a series of close shaves. In 1962, he finished second on his GP debut at Zandvoort in a type 24, then collided with Willy Mairesse’s Ferrari at Spa and hit a telegraph pole. Next, he smashed into the back of Maurice Trintignant’s stalled car at Rouen, then shot through a hedge at the Nürburgring when engine trouble threw him off. Taylor, in vivid yellow overalls and helmet, was retained for 1963 and again escaped with bruises at Enna when he was pitched from his car at 100mph and rolled 50 yards down the track. It’s a wonder Taylor survived until he was released for 1964.
Arundell replaced Taylor on the back of 18 wins from 25 Formula Junior starts and showed well in non-championship races – until his spinning car was hit by Richie Ginther in an F2 race at Reims. The Lotus smashed into a bank, Arundell was hurled out and suffered a broken arm and collarbone, plus severe concussion. Recovery was slow, but he returned to racing on New Year’s Day 1966 when he finished third at the non-championship South African GP in a Lotus 33. But the man in the bright red helmet had lost his glimmer.
Fair-haired Spence with the flaming orange skid-lid was next up and proved the exception to the rule that only Clark could win in Team Lotus F1 cars, picking up the 1965 Race of Champions in the wake of Jimmy’s surprising shunt. Arundell’s return in 1966 shunted Spence to Reg Parnell’s team, then on to BRM – only for him to be recalled to Lotus in the wake of Clark’s death to race Clark’s car at Indianapolis in 1968. A month to the day after Jimmy died at Hockenheim, Spence ran a team-mate’s car in a shakedown, hit the wall and the right-front wheel struck his head. This was motor racing in the 1960s.
‘Return to power’ was the clarion call in 1966, as F1 engines doubled in size to three litres – and Clark’s remarkable stranglehold on F1 was broken. At first glance, Lotus had left itself high and dry without a competitive engine, much like 1961; Chapman fell back on 2-litre Coventry Climax units until he acquired a supply of complex BRM H16s. The engine was anathema to Chapman’s “simplify, then add lightness” mantra, but the type 43 – in which Clark claimed a single win, at Watkins Glen – served its stopgap purpose. Again, the old man had something special up his sleeve.
For the second time in the decade, exactly five years on from the Lotus 25, Team Lotus rolled out another game-changer at Zandvoort, in June 1967. The Lotus 49 remains a classic, but it was the V8 bolted to it – as a fully stressed member – that defined this epoch moment. Ford’s Walter Hayes said it was the best hundred grand the Blue Oval ever spent when it took the Chapman bait once more. Cosworth, formed in the old Hornsey days to prep Lotuses and service Coventry Climax engines, had come a long way under co-founder Keith Duckworth. Now for the first time he designed an engine from scratch, with the help of Ford’s gelt. And in the DFV – double four-valve – you could say he nailed it.
Not that the 90-degree V8 emerged in perfected form. Yes, Graham Hill – a surprise Lotus returnee for 1967 – led the Dutch GP, and yes, Clark scored a landmark win when his teammate’s DFV broke a camshaft, but the Lotus-ford 49 was a flawed combination in that first season. Initially, the engine’s power delivery was switch-like and reliability woeful as Denny Hulme scored his way to Brabham’s second consecutive world championship. But Clark did win four times – twice more than the champion – including at Silverstone in what turned out to be his last visit to the UK. The farmer was now living the life of a tax exile in Paris, embracing a taste for sophistication during the ‘summer of love’. The world was changing, and even Jimmy Clark was going with the flow. But back at the tracks, there was nothing trippy about his performance when F1 hit Monza.
On lap 13, a deflating tyre cost Clark a lap. But on lap 61 his Lotus took back the lead, Jimmy having made up 100 seconds in 46 laps – only for the fuel pump to break on the last one. He was classified third. Never mind, 1968 would be his year once more – surely. No one could ever have considered… No, it couldn’t happen. Not to Jimmy.
At the turn of the year he won in South Africa, his 25th grand prix victory, to surpass Fangio’s record, in a Lotus painted green with a yellow stripe. By the Spanish GP in May the 49 was carrying the lurid red, white and gold-striped livery of Player’s tobacco brand Gold Leaf. Chapman had ushered in another revolution. The tragedy was Jimmy Clark had already been lost, in a piffling F2 race at misty, damp, flat-out, tree-lined Hockenheim. A blown tyre? A misfiring engine? Fifty-three years later it doesn’t matter how or why. The greatest driver of his generation was gone, his friends and colleagues were disbelieving, Lotus was devastated – and the age of innocence was over. Nothing for Chapman could ever be the same again.
THE LOTUS 49 REMAINS A CLASSIC, BUT IT WAS THE V8 BOLTED TO IT – AS A FULLY STRESSED MEMBER – THAT DEFINED THIS EPOCH MOMENT