World’s best driver
Jim Clark was the Borders farmer who twice became Formula 1 champion – only to die in a horrific accident at the height of his fame. Now a £1.65m museum will celebrate the incredible life of the...
AS LAST words go, they were hauntingly prescient. Climbing into his Lotus 48 on a cold wet morning in April 1968 at the Hockenheimring in Germany, racing driver Jim Clark turned to his mechanic and friend, Michael Sim.
‘I don’t like these tyres in these wet conditions,’ he told him. ‘Don’t think I’m going to go charging through. Don’t expect me to be up there in my usual position. I don’t trust these tyres, I can’t get any grip with them.’
Minutes later Clark left the track on a fast curve at 160mph and crashed into a thicket of trees. He suffered catastrophic injuries, including a broken neck, and died before the ambulance reached the hospital. He was 32 years old.
Clark’s extraordinary ascent from Borders sheep farmer to a man who is still, today, recognised as one of the greatest drivers of all time has always captured imaginations.
He was the youngest-ever F1 World Champion, the first foreigner to win the Indianapolis 500, a man with a reluctant jet-set lifestyle, a model girlfriend he refused to marry and a mysterious bolthole in Bermuda that seemed thoroughly at odds with his background raising sheep on a hill farm.
Now, 51 years after his death, Clark is to receive the memorial he deserves in the form of a £1.65million museum in Duns, Berwickshire, near where he grew up, which opens next week. The facility, a development of a smaller exhibit known as the Jim Clark room, has been funded by a number of organisations including Scottish Borders Council and the Jim Clark Trust, whose honorary president is Sir Jackie Stewart, Clark’s rival and a close friend.
‘If Jim Clark could die, anybody could die,’ said Sir Jackie. ‘Jimmy’s death was the beginning of us driving home the reality that has changed the entire world of Formula 1… in regards to track safety. He was almost bulletproof. He drove in such a smooth and calculated way; he never over-drove. He was a driver nobody would ever have thought would have died in a racing car.
‘And suddenly the sport allowed that to happen, because there were no barriers and no protection from those trees that the car catapulted into.’
There are no pictures of the deadly crash that day, and no moving images. Just horrific photos of the wreckage and video footage showing a devastated crowd surrounding what was left of his Lotus, leaving those who saw them in no doubt of the driver’s fate.
Yet until that day Clark – Jim to his family, Jimmy to his friends – had seemed invincible. Fearless, and with a razor-sharp intuition that allowed him to make split-second decisions that often meant the difference between life and death, at the time of the crash he was at the top of his game.
‘He only won two world championships because his life was taken away from him,’ Sir Jackie said.
‘He would have won more, of course he would have. Outside of Juan Manuel Fangio, for me he is the greatest racing driver in the manner in which he conducted his life, on the track as well as off the track.’
Clark’s ‘off the track’ life could at times seem in sharp contrast to the glamorous and glitzy world of motorsport which, at the time his star started rising, was achingly fashionable. The cars were fast, the drivers were faster, and the sport itself was infused with a mystique that attracted celebrities, models and hangers-on in their droves.
Clark’s background, however, could not be further removed. The youngest of five children (and the only son), he was born into a farming family which went back generations at Kilmany House Farm in Fife. When he was only eight years old the family decamped to Berwickshire, to a farm just outside Chirnside.
As a child he drove tractors and even cars on the farm, and despite an education at the private school Loretto in Musselburgh, he left at 16 to work full-time at Edington Mains.
He was introduced to racing by another farmer, Ian Scott Watson, who, one windy June day in 1956, persuaded Clark to take part in a race run from the Borders to Aberdeenshire. Clark turned out to be faster than Scott Watson, a seasoned driver, and from then on he was hooked.
With Scott Watson’s encouragement, Clark began to enter rallies across the country with the Border Reivers racing team. Indeed the farmer, who last year at the age of 88 was awarded the Jim Clark Memorial Award for his services to motoring, would later become his promoter.
MR Watson recalled: ‘His driving was smooth and his anticipation marvellous. You could feel him ease off the throttle and then spot a car he had seen approach on a distant side road. It was difficult to know why he did not feel confident about his ability.
‘He lacked confidence. Yet when he got on the track, it was forgotten. He gave it everything and drove superbly.’
Clark was expected to take
over the family farm, and his initial forays into the racing world were met with disapproval from his parents. But as they watched his remarkable ascent within motorsport, they were forced to admit that perhaps he should pursue his driving talent after all.
On Boxing Day 1958, Clark came second to Colin Chapman, founder of Lotus, driving a Lotus Elite during a ten-lap race at Brands Hatch.
Chapman was impressed and before long Clark was driving with Lotus full-time, a relationship that would last the rest of his life.
By 1960 he had won the Formula Junior Championship and gone on to race in four Grands Prix for the team, coming third in Portugal. From there, his rise was stratospheric and by 1963 he had
claimed the World Championship, winning seven out of ten races in a record that would not be broken until Ayrton Senna, another tragic race driver who once proclaimed Clark ‘the best of the best’, won eight races in 1988.
His work ethic was phenomenal. In the days when travel took considerably longer than it does in today’s super-fast Formula 1 turnaround, he was almost always on the road, arriving at a track often the night before a race, driving the circuit, then on to the next race immediately. But it wasn’t just F1. He raced touring cars, competed in IndyCar rallies, took part in NASCAR events and competed in the Le Mans 24-hour race three years in a row.
In one astonishing year, 1965, he won his second F1 Championship, the Indy 500, the French F2 Championship, the Tasman Cup and dozens of saloon and sports car races. It was a pace today’s drivers would struggle desperately to keep up with.
As his fame grew, Clark became concerned about his public image. Young, strikingly good-looking and notorious for being as indecisive off the track as he was decisive on it, he was surrounded by admiring women and hangers-on.
Yet he dressed demurely, often in smart suits with cuff links, had a modest and unpretentious demeanour, and seemed at times dazzled by the world he found himself in. He signed his autograph, with typical deference, James Clark Junior.
He met Sally Stokes, his longeststanding girlfriend, when they were set up on a date by mutual friends. He was so smitten that he invited her to the opening night of Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor, which they attended with some of Clark’s racing crowd, including Stirling Moss and his wife Elaine.
From there their life became a whirlwind of dates – many of them at racing circuits where Clark was the main attraction – and Stokes was initiated into the Women’s Motor Racing Associates Club and inveigled into timing Clark’s laps.
YEARS later Stokes recalled: ‘Colin [Chapman] gave me a lap chart and a stopwatch and set me to work. It helped distract me from worrying about Jimmy.’ She also accompanied him to the Indianapolis 500, which Clark entered several times and won in 1965, the first non-American to do so and a feat made even more remarkable given that he was also racing in F1 at the time.
Stokes recalls Clark once told her that he liked the race because ‘when I am in the lead, I have dollar signs flashing before my eyes’. Money, however, was not Clark’s
strong point. His accountant made some disastrous decisions on his behalf, and Clark paid much of the money he made to the taxman (some estimates put it as high as 90p in every £1). It led to him exiling himself abroad, far away from his beloved Borders countryside.
Instead he bought a pad in Bermuda, where he shipped much of his furniture and would entertain friends such as the Mosses.
But he was restless and towards the end of his life moved to Paris. Indeed, his gravestone reads: ‘Jim Clark of Edington Mains, Chirnside and Pembroke, Bermuda.’
‘Jimmy was a highly introverted man,’ Sir Jackie recalled once.
‘He ate his fingers, not just the nails but all the skin around them too. But living in Paris near the end changed his life quite a lot. He became more liberated, more worldly and rounded.’
Although Clark’s relationship with Stokes lasted more than three years, he could not commit. ‘Everyone said, “Why aren’t you marrying her?” recalled his friend Sir John Whitmore. ‘They were very good together and she wanted to get married. But he couldn’t do it. He never made any decisions. Until he got in a racing car.’
Ironically, Clark was not supposed to be at Hockenheimring that day.
Originally he had been signed up to race a new Ford at Brands Hatch that weekend, but because of a mix-up with his entry confirmation, he withdrew and went to Germany instead, to honour his long-standing relationship with Chapman by racing in the opening round of the Formula 2 Championship.
Deaths in motor racing were not unknown at the time. It was seen as a hazard of the sport, an undeniable risk that could only be expected when driving at such dangerous speeds.
Indeed, in 1961 Clark himself had been involved in a disastrous collision during the Italian Grand Prix when he collided with Wolfgang von Trips. The German crashed into a side barrier and was thrown out of the car to his death. The car spun into the crowd, killing 15 spectators.
Sir Jackie remarked once that: ‘Racing drivers of that period were very strange people in many respects. We were going to more funerals than anybody would ever go to. And these were people we lived with, we travelled with, we holidayed with and raced with.’
Yet Clark, with his incredible talent and seemingly golden touch, appeared one of the least likely candidates for such a fate.
Sir Jackie was in Spain that day, carrying out a track inspection at the Jarama circuit near Madrid.
‘It was a few days before I moved to live in Switzerland. Helen [Sir Jackie’s wife] was already in Switzerland when I called her,’ he said. ‘And of course she had heard about it as well. We had an empty phone call. Neither of us could really speak.’ The motorsport world was in mourning. One of Clark’s rivals, American driver Dan Gurney, later said: ‘It destroyed me. I was drowned in tears.’
But the industry was also in shock. Clark’s death led to a tightening of regulations, much of it led by Sir Jackie, who was instrumental in getting crash barriers put in place on racing circuits.
The cause of the crash was never properly identified, although it is believed to have been caused by a deflating rear tyre. Clark’s instinct about the tyres that day were, it seemed, correct.
Today, near the spot where Clark’s Lotus came to rest, flowers are still laid at a small stone inscription. Candles flicker in the breeze, an ever-shifting memorial to one of motorsport’s finest.
It seems fitting that now, more than half a century after his death, a permanent monument is to be established in his home town, within the beautiful Borders countryside which he always adored.